If you like the idea of an alternative send-off, you could always try a motorcycle funeral … Stuart Jeffries meets a minister who puts the ‘rev’ into reverend

The Reverend Paul Sinclair shouts to me as we race through the Leicestershire lanes on a brilliant spring morning. “This is very therapeutic, isn’t it?” He’s astride a 1300cc Suzuki Hayabusa and I’m in the sidecar with no safety belt but clutching a helmet that’s too big for my head. I’m exhilarated as he throttles down and overtakes a Ford, but at the same time very much aware this is a near death experience. Only later does the troubling thought occur to me that his clients are all dead.

Maybe, I worry unfairly, he’s touting for trade. “I’ve got the Guinness World Record for the fastest speed on a motorcycle hearse,” he shouts. He does too: a framed certificate in his office says he reached 203.74kmh (126.6mph) at Elvington airfield in York in 2013.

Some call the genial Glaswegian minister the Faster Pastor. Others call him the Quicker Vicar. He’s even been called Tomb Rider. Since he founded Motorcycle Funerals Limited in 2002, Sinclair and his six-strong staff have taken more than 4,000 people on final journeys like this – albeit much more slowly. They have been ferried, not in an open sidecar like the one in which I’m cowering, but in one of his fleet of sidecar hearses built and patented at the firm’s HQ, a former railway goods shed in the village of Measham in Leicestershire.

Sinclair’s firm was the first to offer motorcycle hearses in Britain and is part of a trend towards customised funerals. “Death used to be industrialised,” he says. “Bog-standard coffin, bog-standard hearse, bog-standard music. What is that all about? You don’t need to spend a lot of money to make your or your loved one’s funerals personalised.”

When we arrive at his headquarters, Sinclair shows me the latest additions to his fleet of Harley-Davidsons and Suzukis – two new Triumph Thunderbirds with sidecar hearses, making his firm, he claims, the largest of its kind in the world by far.

His funerals start at £650 but the fee “varies a lot depending on if they specify a particular model [of motorbike and hearse], which affects my logistics and whether or not it is pay now, die later.”

Funerals are changing. According to the Co-Op’s 2015 survey, The Ways We Say Goodbye, 8% of Britons would like “an alternative hearse that says something about them as a person”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Sinclair on the road. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Some 26% said they’d like the mourners to wear bright colours. So what kind of person wants a motorcycle funeral? “I assumed that it was just bikers who opted for this kind of funeral for themselves or their family members,” says Simon, 56, a retired traffic officer who started work recently at Motorcycle Funerals. “In fact, it’s all sorts – often people who have had nothing to do with motorcycles in life, but at the funerals they want something different.”

“I remember we buried a lady on her 102nd birthday,” recalls Simon’s colleague Trevor, 63. “She had no connection with bikes. They sang her Happy Birthday as she was buried.”

He recalls another in which the widow insisted that she rode pillion to be near to her husband in the side car hearse. Sinclair argues that his funerals can also be therapeutic for bereaved children. Sometimes, he says, he has led a cortege of motorcycles past school grounds so their friends can say goodbye. “There are occasions where we’ll ask the kids if they want to be photographed on the bike next to the hearse in which their parent lies in the coffin,” he says. “I think that sort of thing can help with grieving.

“I really believe that children should attend funerals if – and this is the important proviso – they cared about the person who has died. Often children are wrongly kept away from funerals because their parents think it’s not the right place for them. They bottle up the grief, which is no good.”

Sinclair set up Motorcycle Funerals after he nearly died on his motorbike in 2002. He rolls up his left arm to show me the scars after his crash in London. “I was hit from behind and the collision crushed my hand back – that’s why my left arm’s shorter than my right.”

Often children are wrongly kept away from funerals. They bottle up the grief, which is no good

At the time, Sinclair was a Pentecostal minister at the Willesden Revival Centre, north-west London. “After the crash, I had a pre-midlife crisis and decided to provide motorcycle funerals. I’d officiated at many funerals and I loved motorbikes so I thought I could bring the two together.”

He settled in Leicestershire with his Ghanaian-born wife, Marian, and 14 years later, business is booming. “We’ve paid off our debts and I can afford to pay all of us – including me – proper wages.” He shows me his roster of forthcoming funerals.

He hasn’t embraced mammon, though. Rather, Sinclair argues that he is continuing the ministry by other means. “I get more invitations to speak – to Women’s Institutes and so on – than I did when I was a pastor. Last year, I gave about 50 talks. So I feel I’m doing God’s work at least as much as when I was preaching in church.”

He drives me back to the station in his car, which, if less exhilarating, makes conversation easier. I ask the 50-year-old if he’s planned his own funeral. He says he will, of course, be carried to the funeral in a motorcycle hearse. Then what? “I have an agreement with another clergyman. If I go before him, he’ll do my service. And vice versa. He’s a keen biker too, though unfortunately he’s recently become a Catholic so I may have to review the small print.”

So how will it be different? “I don’t want anyone to say I was nice, or that I was a good man. People always say that at funerals and it’s never the truth. I want it to be said: ‘This guy was a dirty sinner and he didn’t deserve to go to Heaven. But God saved him.’”

Has he chosen the music yet? “Cars by Gary Numan and [Chuck Berry’s] Riding Along in my Automobile. There’s some irony in that. I want my funeral to be a bit of a laugh.”