The Single That Was an Instruction Manual: How the Desperate Bicycles Turned 153 Pounds Into a Blueprint

Most bands form to play. The Desperate Bicycles formed in March 1977 for the specific purpose of recording and releasing a single on their own label, and they were not being coy about it. They owned an amplifier and a bass guitar. The Dalston studio supplied everything else. Three hours later they had two songs, and a few months after that they had a lesson they intended everyone else to learn.

A receipt disguised as a record

The Smokescreen single arrived in August 1977 in an edition of 500 on their own Refill Records. Total cost: 153 pounds, covering the three hours of studio time, the pressing and the sleeves. It was mono. It carried the same two tracks on both sides, which was less an artistic statement than a way to avoid paying for a proper B side master. That number, 153, is the single most important thing the band ever produced, because they made sure everyone knew it. Their exhortation, later described by Simon Reynolds as the work of DIY’s most fervent evangelists, was blunt: it was easy, it was cheap, go and do it.

The economics were the point

The reason the argument stuck is that it came with a working model attached. The first 500 sold out in four months and cleared 210 pounds. That profit paid for a second pressing of 1,000, which sold out in a fortnight. The profit from that financed the second single, and the profit from the second single paid for 2,500 more copies of both records plus some actual equipment. Roger Stephens and Danny Wigley had walked the first pressing around independent shops and distributors including Rough Trade and Virgin themselves. No advance, no A and R, no recoupable debt. A band with no money had demonstrated, in public and with numbers, that the pressing plant was the only gatekeeper that could not be talked around, and the pressing plant took cash from anyone.

Frugal by design, not by accident

The music matched the argument. Thin guitars through small amplifiers, wheezing organ, drums that sound like they were recorded in the room they were played in, and vocals delivered somewhere between a lecture and a shrug. Reynolds called the guitar sound frugal to the point of emaciation, and that reads as criticism only if you assume the band wanted the other thing. Tightness and feel were the currency of the studios they were refusing to enter. The band did not even play live until New Year’s Eve 1977, at Eric’s in Liverpool, and they had to relearn their own songs to do it. Their drummer by then was Dave Papworth, who was 14.

What it seeded

The scene that followed took the model more literally than the music. Scritti Politti, close friends of the band, went a step further and itemised the production costs on their debut sleeve, and the same practice turned up on releases by Television Personalities and the Door and the Window. Within two years the UK had a functioning independent infrastructure of self-run labels, and the UK Indie Chart existed to count it. Remorse Code, the Desperate Bicycles album, reached number 10 there in February 1980. The band split in 1981 and have since spent four decades declining interviews and refusing reissues, which is either the ultimate proof of the principle or a very expensive joke on collectors. Their name, incidentally, came from a J. B. Priestley novel, Angel Pavement, published in 1930. Even the branding was borrowed from something already paid for.

The lesson has been rediscovered under a dozen names since: cassette culture, four track indie, Bandcamp, the home studio. Every one of them repeats the same finding. The obstacle was never the equipment or the skill. It was the belief that permission had to come from somewhere else.