Who are your favourite people to work with that help you get that expression across?

Early on I did a lot of stuff with Alex Rankin (Sprung, earthed, WFO Media, etc.). The people I like working with the most know how to push my buttons to get me going. When I used to ride pushbike trials and was competing the person who would get me going the most was my dad. I’d be doing something a bit crap and he’d just go, ‘you can do better than that’. And you’d get angry and think ‘I’m gonna show you’ and you’d do really well and next thing you’d realise he’s just said that to do that. I think from a photography point of view they sort of do the same. Alex or Paul Bliss always put a little jab in. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with Victor Lucas recently.

I don’t think it is that with him, it’s more because I’m confident in his abilities to catch stuff. He’ll stand back and let me do my thing, I’ll just tell him and what I want to do and often I don’t want to do it too many times.

I’ve always enjoyed photography, there were certain times when I thought, ‘right I wanna start doing more photography’. But I was shit at talking photos of people on bikes so that didn’t really work out for me. Film side of things, Nick Larsen was doing that stuff with Charge and I did a couple of little weird ones for him and those Fixie ones started doing well. Dunno, I don’t really think about it now, that’s just what I do.

I never used to be that bothered about it, somebody would turn up to do some photos and it’d just be in whatever I had on that morning. That’s one of the things that I think killed trials off, people just looking like chavs hanging out in a bus stop. They just had a bit of a shocker didn’t they really. I’m not saying that I’m a style icon or anything. But you gotta look half decent haven’t you.

It was really good fun doing that video, we could have spent ages doing crap in quarries but I think it just hit it right with a bit of this and a bit of that.

My girlfriend says I’m like a pikey, it’s not scrap metal I’m after, it’s locations. I’ll drive past somewhere and get a glimmer of an old building or something and wonder ‘what’s over there’. It’s got to the point now where I’m asking around, one of my mates is a geologist and I rang him up the other day and said that I want an interesting rock formation that I fancy doing something on and he’s sent me all these pictures because he’s a proper pervert with rocks.

I’m just like a big kid on a bike really aren’t I? It’s just escalated from a couple of bricks and a plank of wood. I think it’s quite funny in a way, I guess if I had a sense of humour that’s what it would be. I never used to build stuff, it was always 100% natural all the time, but the turning point was when I was in America and I spent a bit of time with Jeff Lenosky and Aaron Chase and they’re just relentless, they’re always out with shovels. That was years ago and I came back from that trip and thought ‘I could have a bit of that’. Obviously if you’re doing quite a bit of filming, you run out of places to ride pretty quick so you’ve got to be always on it. I don’t like to overbuild stuff though, ‘cause I think there’s nought worse than seeing something and then building it and it’s a piece of piss. Because it’s such an anticlimax, you wanna take it a couple of times and have to fight for it. Not just build it and then go, ‘ah that was alright, it rode really nice’. That’s not what I want at all, you want it to be built just shy of being perfect.

Yeah, I’ve done it a lot of times, until I run out of energy. I don’t like backing down from stuff for sure. There’s not many things that I’ve turned my back on, but I can think of them straight away. Stuff years back where I’ve got on a bike and then been at the last second and just gone ‘ya know what, I’ve bottled this’ and that stuff’s still in my mind. I thought about doing a video and pick five of the best ones I’ve fucked up on and go back to do them. That would be quite funny, but no I’m not going to do that because I think that would be too dodgy.

Are you calculated with your riding, do you look at things quite methodically?

I don’t over analyse things, it’s like the old diving board situation, if you’re looking at something for too long, you’re not going to do it. Over analysing things or thinking you’re on the wrong bike or the bike’s not really set up or that tyres a bit soft, I don’t really tend to do much stuff like that. I just think, ‘I’m gonna go flat out at this and it’s gonna be all good’.

I think there’s a slight calculation in there, normally speed. And ignorance. Equals success!