On July 5, 2017, at 7:42am, Pascal Gabriel set off from his holiday home west of Mont Ventoux on a bike he built himself under the guidance of master frame builder Dave Yates. Gabriel’s bike, made using Reynolds 531 tubing, has elegant lines of steel finished in British racing green, with the word ‘Angel’ running along the downtube – a reference to the Angel Gabriel and also to his home at the time in Islington, London, just near the Angel underground station.
He pedalled through the vineyards of some of the Rhône’s finest appellations – Gigondas, Vacqueyras, Beaumes-de-Venise – and on towards Bédoin, where the climb to the summit of Mont Ventoux begins. In spite of the fact his knee was sore, likely from the previous week, which had been spent in the Alps in the company of a few cycling friends who organise an annual excursion known to the participants as the ‘week of pain’, he was making good time. He knew the road well: the draggy first five kilometres, the sharp left turn at Saint-Estève, the horrible and relentless steep climb under the trees to Chalet Reynard, and the final zigzag through the scree to the weather station at the top. He’d been making roughly the same time as a German rider who kept overtaking him, then stopping to drink, but the company was bugging him a little, so he pressed on as hard as he could and left the German behind.
From Bédoin to summit, Gabriel had taken one hour, 46 minutes and 43 seconds. His best time.
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The email – header: ‘Stubbleman – 1:46:43 The Ventoux Trilogy’ – landed just before half past five on a Wednesday afternoon, just as I was about to finish work. Normally I might have left it for the next day, but the combination of words was a little weird and piqued my interest.I opened the email. There was a list of 18 song tracks, downloadable as long as I agreed to the terms and conditions not to share the files, and a few paragraphs of text from a music promotion company.
“Stubbleman is the alter ego of maverick British composer and producer Pascal Gabriel,” it read. “From humble beginnings in a Belgian punk band, Pascal moved to London in 1979 to form a string of art-school experimental bands, until he discovered the joys of the recording studio and established himself as an innovative producer and songwriter. He gained recognition by producing and co-writing two of the iconic tracks that defined the late ‘80s UK techno and…