Video killed the Radio Star

The twin evils of business and lethargy have prevented me from either running or blogging much of late but a recent decision to join a fancy-pants gym in Kensington Olympia has reminded me that I like running to loud music.
I tell you what though, the little ipod stick has been pretty much thrown to one side because if there’s one thing this gym does well, its music. Not just music but music with those moving pictures that all the kids are talking about. The fancypants gym has a telly on every treadmill, AND on every cycle and on each of those tortuous skiing/stepping monstrosities too. They also have several dedicated ‘music-to-sweat-to’ channels. Sadly I seem to waver mainly between the Rock Anthem channel and the Back to the 80s channel. I worry that my gym mentor who seems a bit cool might look over my should and see me giving it to ACDC (To be honest I would be surprised if anyone felt the need to come within a 5 yard exclusion zone of me actually the amount of heat I’m probably giving off)
Anyway the point is this. If its motivation you’re after, get a gym employee to pick the music videos. They have little care for the quality of the music and prefer instead to choose material based on some simple, adrenalin focussed factors:
1) Inclusion of people wearing leotards/ boxing pads in video
2) Number of hot looking naked people on beach/ atop motor vehicles personifying your every body-phobic fear
3) Strong moral content – by which I mean gym morals i.e. if you are fat you are therefore unattractive so you should get down and give me 20 until you are not fat and become sexy and happy.

A very good example of a video which obeys all three of these laws is that of a 1990 Adam Ant release "Rough Stuff" In this video Adam enters in a strange cow print wide shouldered suit, out of shape yet inexplicably 'in the jungle'. He is taken in hand by some hot chicks clad in either girdles and uniform or boxing pads, and eventually, having knuckled down to some comedy shadow boxing, he ends up doing press ups on the lady herself. Phnarr. Dreadful song but the video was worth the visit to the gym alone. And I may share my fondness and admiration for Mr Ant's early adoption of Happy House with the germans alone but there it is.
Similarly un-credible yet bouncy gym based fun can be found in Mickey! by Toni Basil. And she is pleasingly robust looking. Crikey ! I thought. Roll back a couple of years and shave a few pounds off and I could be the star of a seminal novelty classic in a cheerleader outfit and everything. And somehow halfway down a painful 'Fat Burner' regime that was genuinely inspiring.
Today of course we are familiar with a whole genre of music seemingly invented for gyms and perverts watching The Box late at night in the form of everything ever released by Eric Prydz and so forth. But lo! I found a so-so disco remix of a classic (Last Night a DJ Saved my Life) with a cracking comedy Tranny Vogue contest in it. Its not big, and its certainly not clever but when big clever birds find themselves pounding the rubber in a world where neither qualities are nearly as valued as small and stupid then it suddenly looks like the Very Thing. Honestly.
Clawing back some credibility for one second, then obviously the bendy girl action in I like the way you move is rocking in the extreme and is broadly the only reason I ever go to the gym, i.e. to imagine I was one of them bendy girls at rock concerts worthy of being on stage, and also to go a bit mental when he goes 'I like the way you MOVE'

Run One: The Last One is a-Green

First run of the journal, and the one which inspired it...
Track One: The Bar-Kays - Six O Clock News Report (4.09 mins)
An excellent warm up record, which jogs along at a gentle deep funk pace, urging you on with a sotto voce 'news news news news 6 o clock news report'. A chap wailing about Vietnam and The Ghetto takes the mind off imminent heart failure and the colour of your sputum. Took me as far as the newsagents on the corner and beyond the 'fuck it I may as well go home before I die' stage. Just the job.
Track Two: Ride - The Vines (2.36 mins)
Now that is what I am talking about. It was as I was hooning through the park at the sort of speed that would have busted a heart rate monitor, had I bothered to fork out for one, that I came up with the journal idea. There are songs that make the hellish monotony of a run suddenly delightful and this a good example. Funky drums accelerate the pace, then the adrenaline is treated to a burst of what is a seriously rocking chorus, not to mention strangely appropriate lyrics (I find that physical endeavour makes one infantile in this respect, like a crap documentary soundtrack in which having someone singing RUN RUN RUN to accompany a run seems like a great idea). I thought to myself, I should note them down, and thus calculate the length of the run in rock music. And mentally preparing a review might take my mind off the voice in my head that's begging me to stop before it's too late.
Track Three: Four Horsemen - Aphrodites Child (5.52 mins. I managed 4 of them I think)
Time for a little break as Demis Roussos's angelic tones conjure the Apocalypse, which is timely as my lungs had just exploded. But no time to wind down, as Vangelis soon enough gives the first burst of the 'The FIRST horse was whiiiiite' refrain: a sort of preview of the main event which inspired me to take the slightly longer route to try to string it out a bit and race home, victorious, to the endless fa fafa fa fa de lalala. That's the beauty of this one as a running track: the tempo is slow enough to stop you bursting a gut yet it still rocks hard enough to mean that the potential disappintment at not making it through to horse whinnies at the end might just outweigh the desire to fall on your face and be sick. I didn't make it to the whinnying this time. Next time, Demis, I promise.