The Desperate Bicycles pioneered the do-it-yourself ethic of punk, adopting a proselytising role exemplified by their ardent exhortation: "it was easy, it was cheap – go and do it!".
B. Priestley’s 1930 novel Angel Pavement:[4]Turning into Angel Pavement from that crazy jumble of buses, lorries, drays, private cars, and desperate bicycles… In October 1978 vocalist Danny Wigley expressed the motivation driving the Desperate Bicycles' independent stance: "The biggest hurdle is just believing you’ve still got some control over your life, that you can go out and do it".
The band possessed only an amp and a bass-guitar and the studio supplied the other instruments and equipment; "with a lot of courage and a little rehearsal" they recorded two songs, "Smokescreen" and "Handlebars".
Roger Stephens and Danny Wrigley hawked the "Smokescreen" single around the small independent record shops, and distributors such as Virgin and Rough Trade.
For the Desperate Bicycles 'do-it-yourself' "meant the overthrow of the establishment music industry through people seizing the means of production, making their own entertainment, and selling it to other creative and autonomous spirits".
On New Year's Eve 1977 the Desperate Bicycles hired a van and drove to Liverpool for their first gig at Eric's Club.
In 1981 Danny Wigley and Jeff Titley, with Dennis Burns and Cameron Allan formed a new band Lusty Ghosts, releasing a cassette on the Refill label.
[8] The music of the Desperate Bicycles has been described as: "Spindly, fuzzy, guttural guitars through puny amplifiers, reedy, wheezy organs, out of tune electric pianos, cardboard box drums and monotonous declamatory yet somehow utterly reasonable sounding vocals".
[10] The writer Simon Reynolds states that the group's music "was almost puritan in its unadorned simplicity, its guitar sound frugal to the point of emaciation".
The very deficiency of traditional rock virtues (tightness, feel) stood as tokens of the group's authenticity and purity of intent.