Cycling at night one for ravers

Cycling and raving do mix on a Saturday night in the big city.

You haven’t lived until you’ve pedalled through the heart of a big city at night.

Here is a snapshot of cycling: the open road, sun, exercise, health and fitness, good clean family fun on two wheels.

And here is a snapshot of raving: dark, dingy clubs and warehouses, smoke machines, thudding beats and muntered nutters in weird garb with saucer eyes performing strange contortions.

Two disparate activities one would not normally think to conflate. And yet the fine minds behind the recent City of Sydney Bike Festival offered up on its concluding weekend the Bike Rave. And a fine event it was, fulfilling its billing as a “beats-filled, blinged-out ride around the city at a friendly speed, stopping in a few locations for some casual raving, with local DJs performing on low power devices”.

As a long-time jobbing DJ in the pubs and clubs of Hong Kong and Bangkok, and a recent convert to cycling, I was immediately intrigued. Also, having taken part in the festival’s opening event, the Suit Ride, there was a certain symmetry in being there to help close out the festival under a waxing moon just as a posse of besuited business types pedalling through the city under a blazing midday sun had helped kick it off.

The more I thought about it, the more the Bike Rave made a strange kind of sense. There were undeniable loci at which the two worlds intersected: a penchant for form-fitting outfits, a surfeit of Lycra and fluoro, an appetite for performance-enhancing substances, a tendency to push things to the limit, a slight whiff of danger and the odd spot of gurning.

A delve into history hinted at an opportunity lost, for this year two little-known but very important anniversaries also collided. Rather than a footnote to a low-key festival, the Bike Rave should have been bigger than Ben-Hur.

For it was exactly 200 years ago that the bicycle was born, in the fevered imagination of Baron Karl Drais. The baron gave us the 25-key typewriter, the meat grinder, a contraption to record piano music on punched paper, a prototype stenotype machine and, most importantly, his 1817 Laufmaschine, or running machine, ancestor of the modern bicycle; no pedals or chain, just two wheels and a seat, propelled Fred Flintstone-style.

Riders would have been right at home doing the running man dance at a disco, and I’d like to think Baron Karl, an aristocrat-turned-democrat and revolutionary, would have been a mad keen raver, sorted and on one, having it large on a techno tip.

This year also marked the 30th anniversary of Britain’s “summer of love”, when acid house and the rave scene was born as the legacy of New York’s Paradise Garage came home to roost in the unlikely home of Manchester’s Hacienda nightclub. From this monster raving loony crucible erupted DJs such as Sasha, Paul Oakenfold and Andrew Weatherall, musicians like Boy George, the Happy Mondays and 808 State, and a motley crew of promoters, ravers, pirate radio stations and dealers.

The scene quickly spread, linked by London’s M25 Orbital ring road, with keystone cops in hot pursuit. “Oh, is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel? Or just 20,000 people standing in a field? And I don’t quite understand just what this feeling is, but that’s okay ’cause we’re all sorted out for E’s and wizz,” sang Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.

I’m no stranger to night rides. On dark nights of the soul when sleep refuses to come I’ve been known to mount my two-wheeled steed and go for a midnight run to Newtown, echoes of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Edge in my mind, where he’d take his motorcycle for a werewolf run down San Francisco’s coast. I’d suppress the urge to howl as I clicked into the higher gears and put the mettle to the pedals, whizzing down King Street, dodging the drunks, the hoons, the late-night buses, the gaping potholes and deadly car doors.

The Bike Rave proceeded at a far more stately pace, a leisurely run from Chippendale through the CBD and on to The Domain, and the colourful Light the City spectacle.

Scoff at cyclists and laugh at ravers if you must. But you haven’t lived until you’ve pedalled through the heart of Sydney on a Saturday night, portable sound systems booming, bicycle-borne mirror balls dazzling pedestrians, cars honking and hoots and jeers from the pubs echoing through the concrete canyons, ringing your bell and baying like a jackal as you describe concentric, fairy-lit circles around the roundabout in Hyde Park.