Sunday morning, the store doesn't open until noon, and I've got three hours to myself. No customers asking if we have the new Taylor Swift on vinyl. No Barry arguing that The Stooges invented everything worth listening to. Just me, the Lakefront Trail, and this playlist some maniac put together for their friends running London.
Here's what I know about the London Marathon: 26.2 miles through a city that gave us The Clash, The Sex Pistols, and the best three years of pub rock before punk killed it. Here's what I know about this playlist: it's 51 minutes of garage rock and proto-punk that sounds like it was recorded in someone's basement on a four-track after three pints. Which means it's either going to save your run or destroy it completely.
Track one is Wavves doing "Sail to the Sun," which is perfect because it sounds exactly like how running feels at 7 AM—wobbly, uncertain, but committed to the bit. Nathan Williams recorded most of his early stuff alone in his bedroom, and you can hear that isolation in every distorted guitar line. It's lo-fi surf punk that doesn't care if you're ready. You're not. You never are.
By track three, we're into Gallus—Glasgow's answer to the question "what if pub rock never died?" "Marmalade" hits like someone explaining a breakup while drunk at 2 AM. Too loud, too honest, too late to take any of it back. Gallus shows up three times on this playlist, which feels obsessive. I respect that. It's not what you're like, it's what you like, and whoever made this likes Gallus the way I liked making mixtapes for Laura—convinced repetition equals emphasis equals understanding. It never does.
Here's the thing about garage rock: it's all first takes and happy accidents. Death's "Keep On Knocking" at track five is proto-punk from 1974 Detroit, recorded by three Black brothers who never got their due until a documentary came out decades later. The Hackney brothers were doing this before The Ramones, before CBGB, before anyone codified what punk was supposed to sound like. And now it's on a running playlist for London because music doesn't care about your categories or your timeline. It just keeps knocking.
The middle section gets messy—Punkband's "Red Rag To A Bull," Bilk's "Spiked," more Gallus. This is where the playlist stops being polite. Track eight, "Looking Like a Mess," is the most honest title here. You're four miles in, your legs are lying to you about how much they have left, and the music sounds like someone running away from something they can't name.
Then Delta 5 shows up at track sixteen with "Shadow," and suddenly we're in post-punk Leeds, 1980, all angular bass lines and deadpan vocals. Delta 5 was five people who met at art school and decided funk rhythms needed to be colder, more confrontational. They were right. "Shadow" is the track that reminds you running isn't about fitness—it's about being chased by your own thoughts while pretending it's exercise.
The playlist ends with The Ramones doing "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg," which is either genius or cruel. It's one of their most melodic songs—almost pop, almost pretty—but it's still The Ramones, which means it's over before you've processed it. Joey Ramone wrote it about Reagan visiting a Nazi cemetery, turning political rage into two minutes and forty-eight seconds of perfect simplicity. That's the whole trick, isn't it? Take something unbearably complicated and strip it down until all that's left is the part that matters.
What came first—the playlist or the marathon? The music or the panic? Did your friend make this to survive 26.2 miles, or did 26.2 miles demand this exact sequence of songs? I'm nine miles into my Sunday run, the wind is coming off the lake like it's personally offended by my existence, and I'm thinking about how we categorize things to make sense of them. Proto-punk, garage rock, riot grrrl. Easy runs, tempo runs, long runs. Before Laura, after Laura, the years I stopped making mixtapes entirely.
This playlist is fifty-one minutes of refusing to be categorized. It's too fast for a long run, too raw for a recovery day, too personal to be generic motivation music. Wavves and BlackWaters and Gallus and Delta 5 shouldn't work together, but they do, the same way running shouldn't clear your head but you keep trying anyway.
Top 5 reasons this playlist is better than it should be: One, it trusts you to handle the mess. Two, it knows the first mile is always a lie. Three, it puts Gallus on here three times without apologizing. Four, it remembers Death before everyone else did. Five, it ends with The Ramones because everything should.
I finish my run. The playlist keeps going. That's how you know it's good—it doesn't need you to complete it.
