ARRIVING at an East London studio to interview Simian Mobile Disco, I noticed - folded neatly in the corner among the amps and synths - two identical Brompton bikes. How to square this far-from-cool commuter prop with the achingly hip beatmasters I had just met? It wasn't difficult.

“It's great,” one of them said, “You can go into town and if you get p***ed or it rains, you can stick it in a cab on the way home.” If that was the only reason to buy a Brompton, it would have been enough for me. At £600, my Brompton may have seemed an extravagance, but in the five months or so since I made my purchase, I've clawed the money back.

In fact, I started clawing it back on the very day I bought it. Travelling to Manchester to see Bruce Springsteen - no train reservation needed for my new foldy-uppy pal - I bypassed the taxi queue and concomitant small talk with local “character”, sailed past a ringroad dense with peeved fans and made the show with seconds to spare.

Packing it at the last minute for a narrowboat holiday turned out to be a lifeline. Having overestimated our ability to cruise all 110 miles of the Four Counties ring in the allotted six days, we were left with no time to moor up long enough to procure provisions for two families. With a Brompton (and the roomy basket that sits atop the wheel), I was able to courier a constant supply of local deli treats from shops via the toepath without the barge having to stop.

The Brompton really is the gift that keeps giving, making a hitherto impractical journey a problem that you relish solving. Getting to Wembley Stadium from my house in the North London suburb of Crouch End is a public transport conundrum that would fox a delegation headed by Ernö Rubik and Carol Vorderman. And while cycling there in the rain is too much like martyrdom, packing the bike in the boot of the car, driving to within two miles of the stadium and pedalling the rest of the way means that I forgo the privilege of paying £20 to use an underground car park that will take me an hour to leave.

Oscillate between enough forms of transport in your life and you soon realise that your chosen vehicle is akin to a pair of glasses that changes the way people see you. The Chelsea Tractor school-run brigade probably don't take long to develop a defensive default mode. Depending where you take them, Bromptons also seem to engender pronounced reactions. In impossible, impassable London, people are perpetually interested, weighing up the potential benefits of such a thing in their lives. A waitress in an empty Vietnamese restaurant asked me to unfold mine so that she could ride it from one end of the floor to the other.

And while Manchester was fine, 30 miles away, in Liverpool, I could have been wobbling out of Lime Street on a unicycle dressed as a clown for the looks I attracted. On arriving at my destination - the recent Oasis show at the Liverpool Echo Arena - a wall of security gathered to tell me that there was no way of bringing “that thing” inside. Not even if I put it in a cloakroom? It was, apparently, a health and safety issue. Health and safety? Where to even begin with the irony of that one? Not at an Oasis show, I thought, and chained it to the railings outside.

Peter Paphides is chief rock critic for The Times

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