Mad Max

If I was forced at leather-squeaking gunpoint to choose my favourite gun-toting, motorbike-riding mad man, it would probably be Dolph Lundgren’s Punisher over old Mel Gibbon. But, credit where credit’s due, Australia’s most successful dystopian motorcycle-themed B-movie does feature a hell of a lot of utes, violence, characters called “Bubba” and “Toecutter” and, by the time we got to Beyond Thunderdome territory, Tina “thunder thighs” Turner dressed as David Bowie in Labyrinth.

Ryan McGinley

We need to talk about Ryan. The photographer is sexual, precocious, almost certainly too cool to do his own washing and he’s borderline crass. I mean, he wears a “Don’t talk to me unless you’re naked” t-shirt during nude New York loft castings, for chrissakes. 

But his 2007 I Know Where the Summer Goes  photography series, for which the Ginsters took 16 powder-soft models on a road trip from New York to California, is the sort of fleshy heat that hipster dreams are made of. The images are dreamy, incongruous and, in a funny way, timeless.

They also remind me of this video by Starr Whitesides, for the Cee Lo Green track

No one’s Gonna Love You, which is, if we’re honest, more riddled with hip road trip clichés than a leather-and-eyeliner wheel of Emmental. Nudity? Check. Running through bleached fields? Check. Denim cut offs? Chuck. Sun-kissed tattoos? Check. Roadkill? Check. Pppffffffffff.

Y Tu Mama Tambien           

I watched this sexy-three-way-road-trip film with my first boyfriend and his friend Ben, just weeks before we all went travelling together. Good choice. Good times.

While we’re on the subject of heart-breakingly beautiful South American road movies, you could do a lot worse than Che Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries.

The Smiths: Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before

I like to call this video Being Mark Kermode. Or perhaps Attack of the Two-Wheeled Myopic Wimps.

If any of you have been anywhere near east London, the Brooklyn Bridge or Copenhagen recently, then you will no doubt have noticed the profound effect Morrissey’s pedal power has had on our generation of cyclists. Racer bikes? Annoying hair-fiddling habit? Morose pouting? Lack of basic cycle maintenance? Smiths t-shirts? This isn’t déjà vu: this is youth culture, recycled.

Quadrophenia

Sting dressed as Keifer Sutherland in Lost Boys. Phil Daniels before he went all Shitenders. Leslie Ash with Noddy Holder’s hair. Quiffy Ray Winstone in the bath. Bikes, pies and fights. It’s the film that’s got it all. If by “all” you mean “just enough to inspire yet another mod revival”. Sigh.

Lady Gaga and Beyonce: Telephone

I have to admit that I frickin’ love Jonas Åkerlund’s Thelma and Louise-referencing video for Telephone. From the cultish beekeeper outfits to the clunky choreography to the drag queen I saw at Brighton Pride wearing nothing but police tape and coke cans. I do hope Gaga has a car chase cameo in Die Hard 5.13.