Audio Master Class The British Invasion Created by Jennifer Sage Objective: theme ride, cadence challenge Working intensity: moderate to hard Length: 60 minutes This ride is for fun, based on music from artists from the UK, beginning in the 1960’s on up to the 1980’s. It was inspired by hearing so many wonderful songs at the London Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, but this is by no means limited to an “Olympic theme”. I’ve been doing British Invasion themes for many years and they are always a big hit. Since music is such an important part of what we do in the indoor cycling studio, and so many British bands have been instrumental in shaping the music industry around the world, what a perfect combination the two make. If your students are anything like mine, they will eagerly await each song in this profile to see what you have for them. Especially if your students grew up during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. I anticipate you’ll have a lot of smiling faces…unless they are grimacing from the effort! The profile is designed around the song selection, which is the opposite of how I usually create my profiles. That shows you that it’s not necessary to always do something one way. You can change the objective of this ride by altering the intensity. For example, you can turn it into more of an interval ride, by pushing much harder on the climbs and riding much easier on the flats, paying closer attention to interval work:recovery ratios. Or you can treat it like a fun group ride outdoors where the purpose is less on specific training and more on having a good time, going hard on a whim, recovering when your body tells you to, perhaps even racing friends. The latter is how I am presenting this profile. It’s more about having fun and enjoying the ride although when I teach, the importance of proper technique never takes a back seat! I don’t use heart rates during this profile and instead coach it with perceived exertion. By manipulating these songs based on their beats per minute, I’ve turned this into a bit of a cadence challenge, alternating faster songs with slower ones. That means you’ll be playing with your leg speed and the resistance knob quite a bit during this ride. Therein lies the challenge in this profile – being able to comfortably ride at a wide range of cadences. The profile ends with two wonderful challenges - two very classic songs that will bring a smile to your students’ faces (that is, if they can get the grimace of their face from the effort)! These are Under Pressure by Queen and Baba O’Riley by The Who. You are going to have fun with this! Copyright © 2012 Jennifer Sage and Indoor Cycling Association Page 1 Indoor Cycling Association Audio Master Class British Invasion Theme Ride and Cadence Challenge The History of the British Invasions It’s always fun to bring in a little trivia and history into a ride like this. As I was researching the music for this profile, I discovered some very interesting facts about music of the 1960’s to 1980’s. I should point out that it’s not entirely true to state that the “British Invasion” ran from 1960’s to 1980’s as my profile title implies. There were two distinct “invasions”; the first in the 1960’s and the second in the 1980’s. During the 1970’s for the most part, Rock and Roll ruled the music world, with bands from the US equally as successful as those from the UK. The post- punk emergence of “New Wave” music began at the end of the 1970’s and is cited as being the pre-cursor to the second (musical) British Invasion. [If you want to know more, look up British Invasion and Second British Invasion on Wikipedia. The following is from Wikipedia, edited for brevity.] The Huntley-Brinkley Report aired a four-minute segment on The Beatles on 18 November 1963. On December 10, 1963, the CBS Evening News re-ran the CBS report about the Beatlemania phenomenon in the United Kingdom. After seeing the report, 15- year-old Marsha Albert wrote a letter the following day to disc jockey Carroll James at radio station WWDC asking "why can't we have music like that here in America?" On December 17 James had Miss Albert introduce "I Want to Hold Your Hand" live on the air for its American premiere. WWDC's phones lit up and Washington, D.C. area record stores were flooded with requests for a record they did not have in stock. On December 26 Capitol Records released the record three weeks ahead of schedule with unprecedented success. On February 7, the CBS Evening News ran a story about the Beatles' United States arrival stating "The British Invasion this time goes by the code name Beatlemania". Two days later they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was estimated that 45% of Americans watched them on television that night. On April 4, the Beatles held the top 5 positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, and to date no other act has accomplished this feat. Other British groups soon followed including Dusty Springfield, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Donovan, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Tom Jones, the Yardbirds and many more. The British Invasion had a profound impact on the shape of popular music. It helped internationalize the production of rock and roll, establishing the British popular music industry as a viable centre of musical creativity, and opening the door for subsequent British and Irish performers to achieve international success. In America the Invasion arguably spelled the end of such acts as instrumental surf music, and (for a time) the teen idols that had dominated the American charts in the late 1950s and 60s. It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Fats Domino and Chubby Checker and temporarily derailed the chart success of surviving rock and roll acts, including Elvis Presley. The British Invasion also played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music, and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based around guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters. A second wave of the invasion occurred featuring acts such as The Who, The Zombies, and The Hollies, which were influenced by the invasion's pop side and American rock music. Copyright © 2012 Jennifer Sage and Indoor Cycling Association Page 2 Indoor Cycling Association Audio Master Class British Invasion Theme Ride and Cadence Challenge The emergence of a relatively homogeneous worldwide "rock" music style about 1967 marked the end of the "invasion" A second musical British Invasion happened in the early 1980’s as a result of the influence of music videos and MTV. It’s pretty interesting to read about the effects of music videos on the music of the time. Videos are so commonplace now, but those of us who crouched in front of the television drooling at George Michael can remember how groundbreaking MTV was. Music videos, having been a staple of British music television programs for half a decade, had evolved into image-conscious short films. At the same time, pop and rock music in the United States was undergoing a creative slump due to several factors, including audience fragmentation and the effects of the anti-disco backlash. Videos did not exist for most hits by American acts, and those that did were usually taped concert performances. When the cable music channel MTV launched on August 1, 1981, it had little choice but to play a large number of music videos from British New Wave acts. At first, MTV was only available in small towns and suburbs. To the surprise of the music industry when MTV became available in a local market, record sales by acts played solely on the channel increased immediately and listeners phoned radio stations requesting to hear them. On July 3, 1982, The Human League's "Don't You Want Me" started a three-week reign on top of the charts. The song got considerable boost from MTV airplay and has been described as "pretty unmistakably the moment the Second British Invasion, spurred by MTV, kicked off". The September 1982 arrival of MTV in the media capitals of New York City and Los Angeles led to widespread positive publicity for the new "video era". By the fall, "I Ran" by A Flock of Seagulls, the first successful song that owed almost everything to video, had entered the Billboard Top Ten. Duran Duran's glossy videos would come to symbolize the power of MTV. During 1983, 30% of the record sales were from British acts. On 18 July, 18 of the top 40, and 6 of the top 10 singles, were by British artists. Overall record sales would rise by 10% from 1982. Newsweek magazine ran an issue, which featured Annie Lennox and Boy George on the cover of its issue with the caption Britain Rocks America – Again. In April 1984, 40 of the top 100 singles, and on the 25 May 1985 Hot 100 8 of the top 10 singles, were by acts of British origin. During the Second British Invasion, established British acts such as Queen, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Phil Collins and Elton John saw their popularity rise. Copyright © 2012 Jennifer Sage and Indoor Cycling Association Page 3 Indoor Cycling Association Audio Master Class British Invasion Theme Ride and Cadence Challenge The British Invasion Profile Depending on how much music trivia you want to give out during the ride, you can read or paraphrase some of the history of the two musical British Invasions, either in a handout, or during your introduction, or during periods of recovery in between the songs.