It’s that time of the year when cycling comes to the forefront of the sporting world. As I post this, we begin today the third and final week of the Tour de France, and for the first time ever – since it began in 1903 – it won’t finish this coming Sunday on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Instead, while the Olympics gets up and running in the French capital, the race will instead finish with a Time Trial in Nice, and there will of course be lots of cycling in the Olympics too.

---

---

I’ve been a casual cyclist as long as I can remember, having had a bike in one form or another for pretty much all my childhood, and then I resumed when we were living in London. Being relatively fit, I do have a turn of power on a bike but generally I prefer to do it for the love of it, and while I record most of my rides on Strava, I’m rarely trying to break records.

The songs this week are a bit of a mix – some celebrating the simple joy of cycling, others the hell of competitive cycling at both Le Tour and the Olympics – and we start gently before a tough finish. Ride away with me on these ten songs, and thanks, as ever, to everyone who contributed an excellent selection.

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

---

/Hawkwind
/Silver Machine

---

Only a second appearance for the psych-rock veterans, and I have to admit that I did not know that this song is about…building a bicycle. Sure, it’s inspired by Alfred Jarry‘s How to Construct a Time Machine, but instead of taking us into space, this mighty, enduring rock epic – that frankly sounds like it is ground zero for shoegaze among a few other things – is celebrating Robert Calvert’s love of his bicycle. With Lemmy having re-recorded the vocals while Calvert was sectioned, this new knowledge doesn’t half affect my listening of the song…

---

/Queen
/Bicycle Race
/Jazz

---

Not the only song inspired by the Tour de France this week – this one was written after the band attended Stage 18 of the 1978 tour while preparing to record the album in Switzerland. Unlike other songs inspired by it later on in this post, though, this is not a celebration of the difficulty of the race, instead Freddie Mercury notes the simple joy of cycling and getting away from the complexities of the world, as well as women cycling (who are inexplicably nude riders in the video), and going off on a variety of tangents, before there is a chorus of bicycle bells that breaks up the song…

---

/Shellac
/Riding Bikes
/Dude Incredible

---

Ten years passed between the final Shellac album To All Trains – released, of course, just days after Steve Albini died in May this year – and previous album Dude Incredible, which like that last album was a lean, direct album. Like a number of songs penned by Albini, too, the sparse, slower-paced Riding Bikes is a song full of reminiscence. Those days in your youth when you are out with friends riding your bike, occasionally doing things you shouldn’t, and perhaps confiding in those friends in what are likely unguarded moments.

I used to escape onto my bike frequently as a child – getting away from a noisy house, and giving me time to myself. I rarely rode with friends, and in retrospect, I covered quite some distances on some rides – and especially in West Yorkshire, up and down some significant hills…

---

/Boards of Canada
/Happy Cycling
/Music Has The Right To Children

---

The closing song on the still-glorious Music Has The Right To Children, a landmark album in experimental, almost pastoral electronic music, is at least in part a song for cycling. The gentle rhythm – augmented by a bunch of samples, some of which are backmasked, and some of which are much more obvious – feels set perfectly to cycle along to at a comfortable pace, as if they had no intention of ever pushing themselves or their listeners that bit harder.

---

/Frank Ocean
/Biking (solo)

---

Frank Ocean has had an intriguing career, often seemingly uninterested in the trappings of fame or the usual routes for hip-hop artists, and his songs are often deeply soulful (and deeply personal), with little of the braggadocio of his peers. The acoustic-based solo version of Biking is a song that makes me think of summer days, as you accelerate on your bike into the breeze, and feel your t-shirt billow around you – and once again, there’s a sense here of getting away on your bike as a metaphor for escape.

---

/Propagandhi
/Hadron Collision
/Failed States

---

Skate-punk/hardcore veterans Propagandhi provide one of the few moments of anger this week – as much of this post is, as might be expected, rather more laid back – as they vent their rage at being a cyclist in a big city. This sub-two-minute song flashes past, as the protagonist deals with clouds of exhaust, angry drivers and those sneering motorists that seem affronted that they have to share space with cyclists. I used to cycle occasionally in London, and it was always a stressful experience – I didn’t cycle too often from Finsbury Park into the City, partly as there weren’t dedicated cycle routes the whole way until much later. We cycle nowadays for fun down here on the coast, mostly away from the roads (and where we can, on the flat!).

---

/Kraftwerk
/Vitamin
/Tour de France Soundtracks

---

Let’s be honest: there was absolutely no way that Kraftwerk weren’t going to feature this week. Probably the most famous musical exponents of cycling – and indeed an artist who, it’s rumoured, allowed their love of cycling to affect their musical output in the 1980s and 1990s by spending a whole lot more time on their bikes. The whole of the album – released in 2003, twenty years after the majestic titular single, and just missing the 100th anniversary of the tour – is a celebration of the endurance cyclist, with lengthy repetitive sections that reflect the endless motion, breathing patterns as rhythms…and on Vitamin, an examination of the vast number of vitamins, supplements and dedicated diets that (clean) cyclists must consume to be able to complete an event like the Tour.

---

/Abdoujaporov
/The Abdoujaparov Theme
/Djamolidine

---

A first appearance for Les Carter with his new(er) band rather than Carter USM in these pages, and it turns out – quite how I’d missed it I don’t know – that both the band name and the first Abdoujaparov album title – and their “theme” refers to a notable Tour de France entrant.

They are referring to “The Taskent Terror” or the “Uzbek Express”, early nineties Uzbek sprinter Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, who put the fear of god into his opponents thanks to his insane – some might say suicidal – racing style. This short summary video helps show why, including his high-speed crash on the Champs-Élysées just metres from the line at the end of the 1991 tour (which he eventually crossed the line, walking and aided, to win the Green Jersey, despite various broken bones!).

---

/Dubmood
/On the Cobbles of Hell
/Bloodbags and Downtube Shifters

---

Another artist celebrating the Tour de France are French-Swedish group Dubmood, who’s chiptune music is augmented by a variety of other elements to soundtrack their memories of the Tour de France on grainy recorded broadcasts from the 1980s and 1990s – pretty much the era that I first discovered the race, too. To outsiders, it is just a three-week race, but for those that watch it in more detail, it’s a bunch of races within races: some aiming just for one day of glory by winning a stage, some aiming to climb crazy mountain passes and become the ultimate King of the Mountains, some aiming to sprint on the flat and get the Green Jersey, and some to win the ultimate prize of being the fastest across the whole three weeks – and others still are just there to support and provide assistance to those winning any of the above.

This track in particular pays homage to the hell of the cobbles – the pavé sections of ancient cobbled roads, particularly in northern France that it seems that many riders absolutely hate, for the potential danger to their race (mainly as they are narrow, complex sections that almost always do fatal damage to someone’s race prospects…).

---

/The Chemical Brothers
/Theme for Velodrome

---

The 2012 Olympics, in hindsight, felt like the end of an era. The end of a period where the UK was open to the world, before it metaphorically shut the doors with the Brexit vote, and lurched further to the right. But that Olympics. London felt like one big party where everyone had been invited, and it was even more a cosmopolitan city than it usually is, and the spectacular opening ceremony encompassed so much more than we might have expected (even musically). Interesting artists got involved with other music for the Olympics, too, including the Chemical Brothers, who as keen cyclists themselves got to write a piece that would be part of the indoor cycling competition.

Theme for Velodrome definitely owes a bit to Kraftwerk, and is a sleek, techno-based piece that builds slowly – like a cyclist preparing themselves for a race – before exploding into life as that cyclist reaches full pelt on the track.

Twelve years on from London, the world’s attention turns to Paris for the 2024 Olympics later this week, and one of the legacies from 2012 is an immensely strong British cycling team, and don’t be surprised to see them among the cycling medals in the coming weeks.