Sing When You're Spinning

Last night, my internal party animal got a bit of an outing.  The disco diva within went to a karaoke bar with some folks from the office, one of those places where 10 of you sit in a room, have a few beverages and sing your hearts out until the wee small hours.  Gin was involved.

As I was sitting in a cab on the way home (you're all going to start thinking I'm some sort of lush who doesn't really do any cycling and spends all of her time gallavanting around London in taxis - it has been an exceptional week) in a slightly gin-tinted haze, it struck me that there aren't many songs about bikes or cycling.  There are a few obvious ones, of course, like Queen's "Bicycle Race" (which was very pleasingly juxtaposed against "Fat-Bottomed Girls" on the double A-side single release), Katie Melua's "Nine Million Bicycles" and that classic of old, "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" - yes, apparently that's what its official title is - but my brain could only come up with those three straight off the bat.

I've done a bit of digging around this morning and discovered another 10 or so songs or musical works which either are about bikes or cycling or could be about bikes or cycling if you ignore the fact that when the singer mentions a bike, the video for the song has a Harley Davidson in it.  These range from Kraftwerk's entire album of songs about the Tour de France via Engelbert Humperdinck's "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize" to Skylar Grey's very recent offering, "C'mon Let Me Ride" (featuring Eminem), which samples the chorus of the aforementioned Queen song (note that the most intelligent thing that the artist appears to have to say about the song is that the red swimsuit/pink bike scene in the video is totally girly and isn't her at all).

Of course, music is always a matter of taste and while some people will love Queen, others will like Katie Melua, but the relative lack of bicycle songs in popular culture compared to other forms of transport such as cars and motorbikes is interesting - even trains (and boats and planes) probably have more songs than bikes.  I think one of the reasons is that the humble bicycle just isn't seen as being as sexy or glamorous as a motorbike or a sports car.  I guess the image of a leather-clad James Dean or Steve McQueen, or even Peter O'Toole swerving to avoid cyclists as Lawrence of Arabia, with the accompanying frisson of danger and the possibility (or reality) of a romantic death is, to many, sexier and more glamorous than fluorescent Lycra ever will be.  If you compare a young gun in ripped jeans and a leather biker jacket with a middle-aged knock-kneed guy in spandex, there's only going to be one winner.

The Team GB ladies have done a lot to put a sizzle into cycling, of course - Misses Pendleton, Trott and Reade have their fans (as, I'm sure, do all the others), but I do wonder how we (that's the royal "we") can give cycling that bit of oomph in popular culture.  Cycling is certainly popular, and there is definitely a culture around various different sectors of the cycling community, but cycling, as a phenomenon of its own, is not yet considered "cool" in the mainstream - if it were, I wonder if attitudes to cyclists would change.

I'm off to write a Cycle Cycle (it's a bit like the Ring Cycle, only not as long and involving fewer Valkyries).