Not all of the famous builders got started early on. Some were in grade school (or younger) when Street Chopper first hit the stands. Russell Mitchell was one of them. He was born in Frampton on Severn, a small farming village in the west of England. They barely had color TV, let alone imported American chopper magazines back then. When he hit his teens, he was a huge skateboarder but by the time he was 16 he'd made the jump to a motor and two wheels and hasn't looked back since. "I had a buddy of mine who was big into cars who'd occasionally come across American bike magazines like Street Chopper. I remember seeing crazy things like Arlen's two-engine Sportster," he reflected.There were local custom chop rags too, though. Back Street Heroes was one of the more successful European chopper books, and Russell agreed that Street Chopper and other American biker magazines influenced it. "The whole custom bike scene in England at that time (mid-to-late '70s) was very fledgling," Russell told us. At the time, people went as flashy as possible, including him, believe it or not. Don't believe us? Take a look at his first custom job: a coffin-tanked Lambretta scooter. No, you read it right. His first build was actually a chopperized scooter. "I was part of a small faction called The Scooter Scum and we did everything we could to piss off the straight mod scooter contingency by doing everything we could to make our scooters look like choppers." Saying he did that with the Lambretta would be an exercise in understatement. In its stock form the scooter's gas tank sat under the seat; Russell threw that out and swapped in a coffin tank atop the chassis spine. He also hand made solid hex steel forks, heated up in a forge, and twisted in a hair pin. The paint? Not exactly the flat black that's Exile Cycle's signature move. Try a warrior carrying off a naked chick on the back of a sabertooth tiger. "I named it Exile and it won all the shows but it was the sort of deal where you had to have chrome everything. We had a shop in Birmingham that was our go-to place. Bitchin' chrome, but it was horribly expensive."He went on to win a ton of shows with the Lam but somehow deep down he wasn't totally happy with the machine. "I grew out of that look very quickly," he recalls. "Exile 2 was my next scooter and it was blacked out from the top down. I liked it a lot better and it did about as well with the shows. That was my sort of growing up as far as taste was concerned. It was way more subtle. More usable, more affordable, certainly tougher. By this time I'd hit puberty and all of that good stuff. I think this sowed the seeds for the minimalism that became stronger and stronger as I got older and older."
Between the two scooters, though, Russell got his first taste of bigger iron and it changed his outlook dramatically. He wanted to put Exile 1 in England's big Hell's Angels show but they didn't think that would be a good idea. Still, he wanted to check the show out and borrowed a buddy's motorcycle for a look-see. Riding something he could kick over the 100-mph mark did it for him. A week later and hellbent for his own cycle, Mitchell hit a scooter gathering at a campground. The plan was to raffle off Exile 1 at 50 pence (roughly a buck back then) a ticket. By raffle's end he was a scooter lighter and 2500 tickets richer. That gave him the start up cash he needed for his first actual bike: a KZ650. It didn't stay stock too long; Russell changed it into a rigid as soon as he could and it was featured in Back Street Heroes.