Beatle drive: Abbey Road’s iconic crossing

Cycling through the small village of Farnborough, near Biggin Hill, the other day, I was startled to see a street sign for Strawberry Fields. I never did have a clue what John Lennon was on about in that, or any other of his efforts, but it made me wonder what other Beatles songs might be on the London area streetmap.

Sure enough, there’s a Penny Lane out in Walton-on-Thames (near the Shepperton Ferry). No hard-working barbers or well-maintained emergency vehicles on it, though.


And of course there’s Abbey Road, scene of the iconic album cover. The area immediately outside the studios, by pop’s most famous zebra crossing, is something of a shrine now. Clumsily graffitied lyrics adorn the walls, and tellingly most are Lennon’s, which seems appropriate.


At the crossing itself, there’s a perpetual group of psychogeographical tourists taking pictures. It annoys the taxi drivers something rotten, so that's something positive.

The album cover shot was done in a hurry by a snapper on a stepladder, but the road’s far busier these days and you’ll get honked at and run over if you try the same.


The area round here is all wide avenues and big posh villa houses. (Primrose Hill, which Wikipedia suggests was the inspiration for Fool on the Hill, is just round the corner.)

From Abbey Road studios it’s a mile or so of gentle downhill-ish scoot to Marble Arch. If you can’t be bothered to cycle out that way, Abbey Road studios kindly provides a live webcam of the world’s most famous pedestrian markings.

X factor: Bike-through Xenakis at Spitalfields

There's a cycle-through interactive music experience at Spitalfields Market until 26 June. Inspired by the avant-garde Greek composer, the Xenakis Pavilion is part of the Spitalfields Festival (though it's more of a bus stop than something a cricket team could change in).

You bang chunks of wood and metal inside, or just move around a bit, and howly-grindy little loops of sound are set off. It's all fairly arbitrary and produces a series of unpleasant noises rather than anything recognisable as composed music, so captures the spirit of Xenakis very well.

You're not supposed to cycle through it, of course. But it's a great way of making a fast exit.

Sustain pedal: Bike-powered music in Hackney

Yesterday the Bicycle Music Festival came to London.

A collective of San Francisco musicians called Pleasant Revolution started their bike-based European tour, in which the electricity powering their PAs is pedal-generated by members of the audience.

(The show went on despite one of their number coming a cropper on a Surrey hill en route to the gig.)


We caught them in a hot and sunny London Fields, the Hackney park just north of Broadway Market.

This short video of the occasion shows one of them, CelloJoe, in action. And no, I've no idea why one of the cyclists is pedalling backwards.

They're in Regents Park until 7pm today, and further 'guerrilla gigs' are threatened round the capital too.



I quite like this idea of audience control over power supply in gigs. Especially if the guitar solo is starting to go on a bit.

Cymbal of success: London's cycle boom, boom

The purpose of certain things is a mystery to science. Male nipples. Drum solos. The cycle lane at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge.

The third may well never be explained. And before you all write in, we know that the first is a consequence of the way embryos develop as 'default female'.

The standard explanation for percussion solos is that drummers, having so much kit, are the ones with the van. So the rest of the group have to suffer them, because they need the lift home.

However, this is clearly not the case with the drum-kit cyclist Puncturekit, alias busker David Osborne (above). His drum kit is his transport. He's adapted his road bike so it unfolds into a drum kit with five cymbals, three snare drums and a foot pedal. After his gigs, he reassembles it as a bike and rides home.


We first saw him in action a couple of years ago in a Hackney park. Things have moved on since, as the Evening Standard's article on him last year reported.

And on Saturday David was at work in Oxford St (right), exploiting the canyon acoustics of its side streets.

Now, if only Brompton could get going on this idea... I'm sure its designer and slide-rule meister Andrew Ritchie could devise cyclable vibraphones, pedalled tubular bells, bicycle marimbas. Being an itinerant orchestral percussionist would be so much easier.

Any old irony? Singalong fun in Trafalgar Sq

The St George's Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square yesterday were rather fun (right). They included a selection of classic music hall songs, enjoyable without needing any old irony.

Of course, the big problem with Trafalgar Square is the bike parking. There's none in the square itself. The few miserable racks opposite the National Portrait Gallery are always full, even the street furniture and trees (below right).

The handful of spaces behind the National Gallery often do have vacancies, mostly created by bikes being stolen off them.


Still, the music hall songs were a treat. But we think some of them need updating for 21st-century cyclists:

• My old man said report that van
• Any old chromoly?
• If it wasn't for the cars parked in between
• My old Dutch bike
• Wotcher - knocked down on the Old Kent Road
• No bike parking down at the Old Bull and Bush
• A car alarm went off in Berkeley Square
• Let's all go down the Strand (next Critical Mass)
• It's a long way to Tipperary by the Sustrans route


And the most famous cycle song of them all, Daisy Bell, certainly needs a makeover. (I pontificated about this in detail in a recent column for Cycling Plus.) Here's a better set of words for the cycle-based relationship of today:

Daisy, Daisy
Text me your answer quick
Last night's hazy
So is your Facebook pic
It won't be a stylish speed dating
I've got no credit rating
But have some booze
Show your tattooes
And we'll snog on our bikes in pub-lic

Bit of trouble with the last line, I'll grant you. But Marie Lloyd could've carried it off, no doubt.

On the saddle of Solsbury Hill

The rain scuppered our cycling weekend in the Peaks. (We looked for a replacement activity which might benefit from the introduction of water. So instead we had a whisky tasting weekend in the Peaks.) Meanwhile we entertained ourselves by compiling our Top Entries for the British Songbook. (I've discussed bike-related pop songs, like Elton John's Sprocket Man, in a previous post.)

One of the suggestions was Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill. I was delighted to see on the YouTube video of his 2003 World Tour that he performs the song by cycling round stage on a folding bike. (I see that kimbofo, whose London cycling diary is still alive, had spotted the video before.)


It looks like a Moulton to me. That would make sense given that it comes from Gabriel's stomping ground of Wiltshire. Solsbury Hill itself is between Bath and Box, his home town. The lanes round its east side, easily accessed from the Kennet and Avon canal (on which you can cycle all the way to Reading), are lovely cycling country. When it's not cascading with rain.

Anyway, as Mr Gabriel is riding in his normal clothes, without a helmet, and is clearly enjoying the whole thing enormously, we're happy to elevate him to the status of Real Cyclist.

Chorus of disapproval for bike iPod speaker

BikeRadar carried a news item yesterday about a bike-friendly iPod speaker that sits in your bottle cage (right). The idea of a bike speaker isn't new, of course – I posted about a handlebar-mounted system in May. We've heard nothing about it since.

Most cyclists seem to hate the idea of bike-mounted speakers, if the comments on the BikeRadar item are a fair indication.

But it did get me wondering, again, about bike-related music. Here are a few suggestions. No doubt you can do just as badly; browse Socrata's list of Top 1000 songs for inspiration...

Diamond frames are forever
Ain't no mountain bike high enough
I want to hold your handlebar
Hey! You've gotta hide your gloves away
Penny cycle lane
Not good vibrations
Let's twistgrip again
Should I stay or should I go? Oh, it's only a red light
Itchycoo cycle park
Big yellow taxi blocking my cycle lane
Papa's got a brand new barbag
That'll be the Dahon
Message in a bottle cage

Bikes, proms and Elgar? Sounds a good combination

The Proms start today. Every evening between now and Sat 12 Sep there's a world-class orchestral concert at the Albert Hall (right, pic from londonconstant) for five quid.

The Proms experience is best enjoyed by bike. (There are bike racks behind the Hall by the top of the steps where you queue, or near the bottom of the steps across the road.) Gliding home through Hyde Park on a warm summer evening, past Buckingham Palace and Big Ben, with a Shostakovich symphony in your head battling the police sirens, is unforgettable.

A prom concert is one of those unique London experiences, like sitting on a train next to a minor celebrity whose mobile phone conversations turn out to be utterly dull. Or enjoying the amazing view from Tate Modern bar of St Paul's and the riverscape and of your bike being nicked. Or getting stuck in a Parliament Square jam thanks to a mob protesting about somewhere you've never heard of. OK, so it's rather more fun than those.


Anyway, the First Night tonight includes Elgar's In the South. The great English composer was a very keen cyclist (right), from taking it up at the age of 43 in 1900 to about 1909, when his wife Alice insisted on going everywhere by car instead. Many might know the feeling. There's a whole book about the composer's cycling exploits: Kevin Allen's Elgar the Cyclist (Aldine Press 1997, ISBN 0 9531227 0 0).

Elgar was clearly a Real Cyclist, who simply enjoyed the freedom and scope of travelling on two wheels in everyday casual clothes. (Yes, they were his everyday casual clothes.) He'd have had none of this nannyish, protective-headgear nonsense: whether you wear a bowler hat or not is entirely up to you.


In his cycling decade Elgar cycled thousands of miles touring the countryside round his Malvern home. His cycling maps are criss-crossed with dense red lines plotting the routes he took. His visionary masterpiece Dream of Gerontius was evidently composed on the saddle; it's a powerful near-death experience, which suggests he knew a thing or two about cycling on fast rural roads.

Handlebar hi-fi? Not music to my ears

Listening to music through headphones while cycling? Bonkers. How can you possibly concentrate on the most important thing, such as the stretto in an atonal Shostakovich fugue, with all that traffic noise putting you off?

But seriously... it does seem a pretty stupid thing to do. Navigating through central London requires an undistracted brain at full capacity. It's a cacophony of crazy people yelling at each other, blaring horns, and droning wind noise. And that's just the Wagner.

And, curiously, the cyclists you see nodding their heads along in a world of their own to an unseen drum'n'bass all wear helmets. Better not to come to grief in the first place. A south London inquest yesterday dealt with the dreadfully sad case of a student who was run down and killed by a tram from behind while listening to his iPod on his bike.

So I'm not convinced either by the announcement the other day by Taiwanese firm Agios Technology. The Podio is a handlebar-mounted, front-light-sized hi-fi for cyclists: a 2GB MP3 player with a built-in 1.5W speaker and up to 20 hours of battery life.

Oh no! I don't like the idea of every traffic-light stop on my way to work bombarding me with other people's music. They might like Celine Dion or Nine Inch Nails or Wagner, but I don't want it sledgehammered at me by the lights at The Cut while my breakfast is still going down.

But maybe there are more inventive uses for it. You could have Abba playing as you cross Waterloo Bridge. The Kinks on the way back over at sunset. Gerry Rafferty down Baker Street. Holst's Hammersmith in Hammersmith.

Or perhaps just recorded messages of abuse to save you shouting at bus drivers.

Kagel's music for 111 bikes puzzles commuters, delights press

I intended to go along and watch the street performance of Kagel's Eine Brise, for 111 bicycles, this morning. I ended up being pressganged into taking part.

The piece last about 3-4 minutes and requires 111 cyclists to pedal slowly round a short circuit in a town centre. Signs put up at various points instruct them to ring their bells, sing a vowel sound, whistle, make a whooshing noise, go 'rrrrr', or be silent. The organisers had called in the services of some London Chamber Orchestra people who had got hold of the score, couriered from New York, just a day before the performance.

It was all part of the East Festival, which has some more bike-related events over the next few days.

I was out for a birthday breakfast beforehand. Some of the presents were wrapped in that A-Z streetmap paper (top right). Fortunately one of them had just the section I was heading for: Lamb St, by Spitalfields, near Liverpool St station off Bishopsgate.


I was pounced on about 9ish when I arrived by one of the t-shirted organiserettes. They were a bit short of the 111 intended by offbeat composer Mr Kagel - about 90 short, in fact. All those times I've turned up to a performance at Covent Garden or the Coliseum with a part memorised just in case the tenor drops out at the last minute, and at last my chance!

So I was kitted up with a festival t-shirt the colour of a felt tip pen and put through a quick rehearsal by Mark of the London Chamber Orchestra. Most important was the fact that my bike has a bell - mine's tuned to a high E. No, actually, most important is that Carluccio's provided free coffee.


After a couple of run-throughs, we did our performance at about 9.40am to a decent contingent of the world's press. In fact, there were more people behind lenses than there were in front of them.

They demanded an encore. An audience demanding this in a concert hall this would mean we'd been very good. The press demanding this in a shopping precinct meant we'd been rubbish. It meant they needed some decent footage for the 'And finally' section of the Latvian evening news, and they hadn't yet got it. Which meant there was a chance we'd be replaced by YouTube footage of a skateboarding dog.

So we did another run, and this time we nailed it. A lot of these crazy modern performance pieces - whether seriously philosophical like Cage's et al, half-joking like Kagel's, or (to me) utterly weird like Cardew's - fall embarrassingly flat unless you go for it totally, ignoring how silly you feel. And then, curiously, they actually work. (Perhaps an evening performance after half a bottle of wine each, rather than on the way to work in front of bemused suits, might work better.)

And it was all very sociable. I chatted to a friendly lass from Newcastle who was also participating. Well, she claimed to be from Newcastle, but she wasn't wearing only a skimpy t-shirt or high heels, even though it was freezing cold.

We may only have been two dozen cyclists instead of the full Nelson, but, do you know, I think it rather worked. Plus I'm a free lime green festival t-shirt two sizes too small to the good.

So hats off to Mauricio Kagel.

And now I can go and listen to some Shostakovich instead.