Of cowboys and cyclists.

Mémoires d'un Vélo, Part Two.

When I was at university in the late 1980s, there was a student band I used to love. They were a hillbilly outfit; dungarees, DMs, straw hats, ukuleles and politics that were so woke that they’ve still not been to bed, 37 years later. They also had the best name of any band, ever:

Wild Bill Harzia and the Malaria Swamp Dogs!

I was friends with a couple of the band, which instantly made me 2% cool. One of them was a Geordie genius called Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and, more recently, the astonishing libretto to the groundbreaking opera Festen which I recently went to see at the Royal Opera House.

Lee was (still is) an amazing character, and the band were bloody good. Sadly the internet has not trace of them, so I can’t post a picture. Indeed the only google hit for the band is from a blog written in 2009 by a writer called Joella, who was at university at the same time as me. Joella remembers making friends with a like minded fellow student, who “had a very cool older brother, who was in a band called Wild Bill Harzia and the Malarial Swamp Dogs.” Someone in the comments chips in with “I saw Wild Bill Harzia and the Malarial Swamp Dogs…[in] spring 1988. Small venue but one of the best shows I went to, great fun.”

But enough about them. How on earth does this relate to cycling? The only honest answer is: enormously tenuously. But I wanted to tell you about them, so I did.

The tiny pinpoint of connection, enough for me to fashion this junction, is to be found in the first two words of the band’s name: Wild Bill. There is also another connection around bilharzia and Chris Froome, but that is a cul-de-sac too obscure for even me to run down. Let’s move on.