I didn’t know Bicycle Garage Punk was the new music genre I’d been searching for until I heard the propulsive singlespeed cadence and Clean-via-Snapper ramalama rock’n’roll sing-along simplicity of this new beauty, “Raleigh Arena”, from Tāmaki Makaurau/ Auckland-based (but still Otautahi/ Christchurch underground music/Melted Ice Cream label associated) musician Jim Nothing.

I’m not sure if ‘motorik’ is the appropriate way to describe the groove of a bicycle song. Maybe it should be ‘leg-pumping’, although that sounds a bit weird. Whatever we call it, the sound of this song is the sound of blasting along on a bicycle with the wind at your back and a smile on your face.

It’s overdue for bikes to have their own rock anthems. There’s been plenty of music about cars over the years so the humble bicycle is overdue for musical tribute, and the even humbler ‘rat bike’ like Jim’s Raleigh Arena celebrated here is even more overdue. [“Rat Bike” is the affectionate term given to ugly old bikes that are ridden often, never cleaned, and maintained at the absolute minimum to function. They are also hoped by their owners/ riders to be unwanted by thieves.]

In the late 60’s bikes did have a bit of music counter-culture love, for example from classics like Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle” with anthemic lines like “the rain comes down but I don’t care/ the wind is blowing in my hair” and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd’s “Bike” with it’s memorable introduction: “I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you like/ it’s got a basket, a bell that rings/ and things to make it look good/ I’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.”

Even in the 1970s megastars Queen wanted to ride their bicycle. But by the 1980’s bikes had fallen out of fashion and it was all “punctured bicycle/ on a hillside desolate”. Bleak. I blame the impractical-for-cycling baggy pants and big hair of the New Romantic era.

Anyway this song brought a smile to my face in the same way the rattling mudguards on my daily commuter bike do, because the noise reminds me of the fun of cycling enjoyed as a kid around the flat but wind-blown streets of Invercargill on an old Raleigh bike with mudguards clattering and clacking against the steel frame and seat-stays from vibrations from the bumpy road surface.

Back then we didn’t think of writing songs about bikes because they were neither cool nor a statement of anything, just an unremarkable everyday necessity of lower-socio-economic-family life in a one-clapped-out-old-car Invercargill household.

Nowadays riding a bike is a little bit of freedom and feels like an act of protest against a car-dominated world as well as a middle finger extended towards the toxic anti-bike political culture in 2020s NZ ‘Culture Wars’. “Raleigh Arena” is this bike punk’s theme song now. Thanks for capturing the cycling zeitgeist Jim Nothing.