David Kitchen, aka Velocio, set up the London Fixed Gear and Single Speed Forum almost three years ago. In a short time it has spawned an active and inventive cycling community and in the process the forum has grown to become the world’s eleventh most visited cycling website. David talks about the success of the forum and gives pointers for anyone thinking of using the web to bring cyclists together including how to bridge the online and offline worlds.
The Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra combine music, theatre, sculpture and bicycles with a sometimes chaotic and often subversive DIY ethic. Their debut album Nine Doors is out next month as a free/flexible price digital download. Band members David Birchall, Zeke Clough, Josh Kopecek, Huw Wahl talk about the sonic potential of the bicycle, improvisation and creating culture out of nothing. Read a review onEast London Lines of the Orchestra’s performance last week at Barden’s Boudoir. Upcoming live dates are on the Orchestra’s MySpace page.
This is the last show of the current season. The Bike Show returns to the airwaves on 5 May 2010.
A youthful feel to this season opener with a visit to Lockleaze Primary School in Bristol, one of an number of Sustrans ‘Bike It’ schools acros the country. Plus childhood memories from Paul Fournel, reading from Need for the Bike* in person at the Calder Bookshop. We get the inside scoop on the much-awaited Sturmey Archer S3X, three speed fixed gear hub, from SA’s General Manager Alan Clarke.
If you are a parent or teacher and want your school or your kids school to be a Bike It school, you can ask on the Sustrans website.
Image credit: Cycling England 2008
Play on links below. Other file formats (e.g. Ogg Vorbis) are here.
*If you buy Need for the Bike by following the link (left), some of the money goes to Resonance FM!
It’s the end of the road for The Bike Show. Find out why in this special podcast only final edition featuring many Bike Show favourites including Buffalo Bill, editor of Moving Target, cycle sport correspondent William Greswell, London bike messenger Nhatt Attack, Barry Mason of Southwark Cyclists, and Joe and Wes from the London Bicycle Repair Company.
Please note that this special episode was broadcast on 1 April and is what is known, in France, as Un Poisson D’Avril.
Bicycle polo. It’s the latest sensation that’s sweeping the nation. After an account of bicycle polo played with Hungarian counts in 1934 from Patrick Leigh Fermour’s classic Between the Woods and the Water, we travel to De Beauvoir Town to find out how the game is being played in 2009. The European Hard Court Bicycle Polo Championships will be held in London this August. For more on where to play, there are lots of listings here.
No Bike Week – what happens to a cyclist when he or she can’t ride for a week? Let’s find out. More details soon. It’s likely that No Bike Week will take place at some point between now and Easter 2009. Expresssions of interest to bikeshow@resonancefm.com
Picture credit: Roxy Erickson.
Play on links below. Other file formats (e.g. Ogg Vorbis) over here.
This week’s show features Dave Brailsford, Performance Director of British Cycling, explaining how his team achieved a record medal haul at the Beijing Olympics. We also discover that Shanaze Reade (pictured left, racing in the team sprint with Victoria Pendleton) has never heard of fixed gear freestyling despite being a world champion cyclist in both BMX and track racing. Someone who is all too familiar with the fixed wheel phenomenon is BikeSnob NYC, who regularly wins gold medals for “systematically and mercilessly disassembling, flushing, greasing, and re-packing the cycling culture”. Over a few ales, the BikeSnob offers his reflections on 2008 and his hopes and fears for the coming year. We talk penny farthings, the Opinionated Cyclist and how to survive the New York winter on two wheels.
Photo credit: knackeredhack
Play on links below (MP3). Other file formats (e.g. Ogg Vorbis) over here.
Jack Thurston is away and in his place Amy Cooper presents a show devoted to the swashbuckling Trixie Chix, London’s female fixed wheel freestylers. Will Amy and her sit-up-and-beg town bike cut the mustard with the trackstanding, bike polo playing, long skidding, backwards circling Trixies? Find out…
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Earlier this evening I learned with great sadness that Sheldon Brown, the mighty, generous and wonderfully eccentric cyclist and repository of so much bicycle knowledge, has died. On behalf of everyone who helps to make The Bike Show, I extend our deepest sympathies to Sheldon’s family and friends.
Despite being a regular visitor to his encyclopedic website, I never had the pleasure of meeting the man, although he did twice appear on The Bike Show. Kieron Yates met and interviewed him for the show on the joys of fixed wheel touring and I made a rather primitive remix of Sheldon’s own homage to classic English three speed bicycles. Sheldon was usually quick on the uptake with new technologies and back in 2005 he made a few podcasts of his own.
In the fullness of time, The Bike Show will produce a proper tribute to Sheldon. If you want to your own memories and thoughts about the great man to be part of that show, then you can leave a video, audio or written tribute using the Comment link at the bottom of this post. It should work with any computer webcam/microphone and there is a preview available before you press ‘send’. Tell the listeners of The Bike Show what Sheldon meant to you and to your life on two wheels.
Image from John Prolly
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