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"It was The Desperate Bicycles that gave us the incentive. 'If you're thinking of making a tape why not go the whole way and make a record?' they said."
---------Scritti Politti, Sounds January 1979 interview
Somebody Else Said:
Picture, if you will, dear reader, the scene. It is 1978. It is Oxford, England. Little Clarendon Street, to be exact. It's probably raining as a callow youth of 18 makes his way down to Sunshine Records, the most unaptly named emporium in the history of anything or everything. A miserable little hovel run by sullen sadistic men with hearts of stone and bulging wallets whose only saving grace was the musical ingots of inestimable value contained within its portals. I always felt about 3 foot high whenever I went in there; they made you feel as if they were doing you the most colossal favor imaginable as they took your money. But they redeemed themselves consistently in my eyes with the variety of the music they stocked. They had all the imports, all the stuff you really wanted, right there on funny little wooden shelves. I always spent an age deciding what to earn my hard-earned cash on in there and always came out thinking somewhere along the line I'd made the wrong decision. This time it was going to be different. I was gonna walk right in, take that Velvet Underground EP called Foggy Notion right off the rack on the front desk, slam down cash and split. No half measures. But of course it didn't quite happen that way as it turned out. Not quite.
'Look at this', the eternally unsmiling individual behind the counter gestured pityingly towards his mate, sat at the back in a Virgin Front Line sweatshirt, 'someone's buying the Desperate Bicycles.' I quaked in my shitty purple basketball boots. It was too late to back out now and yet how I wished I'd had the courage of my initial convictions and bought the Velvets EP, then they might even have been a bit impressed. But no, like the gullible teenage punk rock sheep I was I'd gone and bought two loser records by a couple of no-hope combos called the Buzzcocks and the Desperate Bicycles. They were just there in the racks and I couldn't resist. What came over me?
As I mooched out of the shop, the imaginary mocking laughter of the two Neanderthals behind the counter ringing in my paranoid ears, I told myself I had brought this misery upon myself and that I deserved all I got. Two crappy little 7" records that didn't even look as if they had proper sleeves and probably sounded like a poor imitation of the Cortinas, last week's monumental error of judgement. I'd even spent the money I'd put aside to buy the Subway Sect single that'd probably never happen. These uplifting thoughts uppermost in my mind, I trudged home and put them on the turntable. About 15 minutes later I had come to the realization that my life would never be the same again. True, we have to consider more than just the music here, for reasons that will soon become all too clear (that is, if they aren't already), but the music produced by the two bands I'm grappling with here still sounds as vital today as it did all those years ago.
Of course, what I didn't know when I walked into Sunshine Records that day was that the Desperate Bicycles had already put out their first single entitled "Smokescreen" in early 1977, with both the title song and the 'B-side' "Handlebars" appearing on both sides of the 7", no details on the sleeve, no nuffink. The thing was of course to get it out there in the shops, to do it, to shatter the mystique. And they did. So why not do it again? It seems as though all they needed to do was come up with two more songs, which they duly did. "The medium was tedium" and "Don't back the Front" duly appeared; that was the single I bought. Later they put out other records, including the third EP entitled New Cross, New Cross, which may or may not contain a clue as to their point of origin. Of the group themselves I know next to nothing. No photos on the sleeves, no record company biography, none of that sort of thing. (Now we know slightly better; more anon.) Forgive me if I begin to bore you, but it bears repetition; the important thing was to get the music out and to do it independently, the main considerations being not just the end product but also the very means of production. As the years have passed and the giant strides for autonomy that they took have become things most groups and musicians now take for granted, the Desperate Bicycles have almost been relegated to the status of a joke band; indeed, on several occasions I've noticed their name used as a byword for naïve amateurism and shambolic discord. Sounds fine to me! But the fact of the matter is that in their own way the Desperate Bicycles (deep breath) were/are/will be as important as the Sex Pistols, in some ways more so. There, I said it. And I mean it.
'Shambolic', 'amateurism'; these are words we come back to again and again. A whole musical generation has been polarized by concepts like these. The Desperate Bicycles never sought to promote such values actively, at least not the way I see it now, but neither were they going to feel stigmatized or guilty about having such labels attached to them and their records. The means justified the ends; the promotion of a liberating and alternative way of doing music, bypassing the music business establishment justified their not sounding like Cheap Trick or even the MC5. Theirs was surely an act of leading by example; "it was easy, it was cheap - go and do it!" they yelled out at both the end of "Smokescreen" and at the end of each verse of "The medium was tedium," a call to arms, an attempt at galvanizing some kind of collective change of attitude, provoking a wave (a new wave?) of D.I.Y. music and records. When Johnny Rotten said he wanted there to be more groups like his, he was just playing pop stars. When the Desperate Bicycles sang "no more time for spectating", they meant it, maaaaaaaan.
And the music? Cracking, as it happens. Spindly, fuzzy, guttural guitars through puny amplifiers, reedy, wheezy organs, out of tune electric pianos, cardboard box drums and monotonous declamatory yet somehow utterly reasonable sounding vocals. Just my cup of tea, in other words. They were labeled quasi-psychedelic (quite understandable really - they had a keyboard player, after all!) but this doesn't touch it. It's rock music that doesn't rock, memorable little tunes and riffs, but never is it pop - it just exists in its own space, post-punk before punk got going at all. The important thing is the words; you can only hear snippets in the garbled rush of Danny Wigley's torrent of consciousness, but that's not the point in a way. What you can pick up is enough. You don't need to know the words to all their songs to realise that the Desperate Bicycles had something to say. Without wishing to decry or belittle their music one iota, in a way their most notable achievement was that they existed at all. One small but firm and utterly telling shove and the floodgates were well and truly opened, never to be closed again.
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