History – The Beginning

Christ On A Bike goes back further than their recording history suggests. Although their first LP “Heaven’s Cycle” came out in March 2004, they actually started recording as far back as 1999.

Chris and Holly first met back in March of that year in England. Their relationship became more serious when Chris visited Holly’s home town of Columbus, Ohio in the States the following October and this was where the first seeds of their musical endeavours came about.

Holly was working for a local TV/radio station and was using the Sonic Foundry Acid Pro catalogue of samples and software to create themes and background sounds for news items and other programmes for radio and TV.

Holly also trained in the gym a lot and for bodybuilding routines she started making her own accompanying music. Soon, both she and Chris got the Acid Pro bug.

Sadly, many of the Hi-NRG tunes Holly created back then have been lost in time, particular when she moved to England in 2001. This is most sad, as there were a number of excellent tunes that would easily be of sufficient quality to fit on a C O A B LP.

Back in England, Chris had a trial version of Acid Pro 2 and some CD samples taken from magazines and set about creating around seven tunes including the now legendary “illegal” tune of “Stomp”. This five minute ditty was renamed “South Park Stomp” when additional SP samples from the popular cartoon TV series were "borrowed" and used. The three versions that exist all feature on “Heaven’s Cycle”.

Then in February 2004, Chris was regularly chatting to music enthusiasts on a web chat room where people openly discussed their CD collections and musical likes and dislikes. The phrase “christ on a bike” was used by Chris, this a reference to a saying that would regularly appear in the “Angst” pages of the New Musical Express music paper in response to reader’s letters.

The chat room people were surprised by this and thought it actually referred to a “stoner rock band”. The seed was then sown in Chris’s brain to create a “pretend” band called Christ On A Bike and maybe even flesh out their existence with an imaginary LP.

Before long Christ On A Bike not only had two additional band members, all imaginary, but also had an actual real LP with songs put together by Chris and Holly. Christ On A Bike were not so imaginary anymore, they were a real entity and the chat room people were given access to hear the tunes and the response was good!