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Katie Melua’s Million Bicycles

The best known song of Katie Melua’s second album, Piece by Piece, is the classy Nine Million Bicycles written and produced by her longtime creative collaborator Mike Batt. Nine Million Bicycles went on to propel Katie to the fifth spot in the solo artist music chart in Britain. The song that found so much favor with her fans has a history that had been revealed by Katie. She, along with Batt was in Beijing and touring the city when the interpreter told them the city has approximately nine million bicycles. What started as an amazing yet trivial information about the place they were in, inspired Batt to pen the lyrics of the immensely popular song that came to be known as Nine Million Bicycles and became a runaway hit.

The musical accompaniment of this Katie Melua song has a combination of ocarina for the low sounds and Chinese bamboo flute for the high sounds and this invited favorable reviews where it was acclaimed as one of the ‘highlights’ of the album. The catchy and poignant lyrics of the song, according to Katie, makes it one of her favorite as how a trivial fact – nine million bicycles -- is wonderfully juxtaposed with one of the deepest emotion of human beings – I will love you till I die. Nine Million Bicycles is also a popular music video that features Katie Melua and shows her being dragged through a variety of settings including the Summer Palace in Beijing before she joins her friends for a picnic in a park.

The popularity of the song reached such a high pitch that a Slovenian cell phone operator used it in a prominent way to campaign its radio and TV advertisements. However, Nine Million Bicycles also came with its share of controversy when lyrics from the song was questioned on grounds of scientific veracity – We are 12 billion light years from the edge/ That's a guess — no-one can ever say it's true… This led Batt to plead for poetic licence although Katie agreed to re-record the song with the proposed corrections and the revised version was released taking away some of the spontaneity of the song. In spite of all this, Nine Million Bicycles became one of the most popular songs in Britain in the year 2005, and it was nominated in the Record of the Year prize though it lost the top honors by a slim margin.