History of the bicycle fashion of the day made the "ordinary" bicycle inaccessible. Queen Victoria owned Starley's "Royal Salvo" tricycle, though there is no evidence she actually rode it. Although French and English inventors modified the velocipede into the high-wheel bicycle, the French were still recovering from the Franco-Prussian war, so English entrepreneurs put the high-wheeler on the English market, and the machine became very popular there, Coventry, Oxford, Birmingham and Manchester being the centers of the English bicycle industry (and of the arms or sewing machine industries, which had the necessary metalworking and engineering skills for bicycle manufacturing, as in Paris and St.
Love Machine (The Miracles song) version, performed by Thelma Houston. Houston's version became a popular song with club DJs at the time in the United States, although it did not chart. In Asia, and especially in Japan, "Love Machine" became Houston's most successful single, topping the Japanese charts. The success prompted her album "Ride to the Rainbow" to be reissued as "Love Machine" for the Japanese release. Wham! performed a cover version of "Love Machine" on their 1983 album, "Fantastic". The track was recorded as a last minute replacement for "Careless Whisper", which Wham! decided to save for their second album. "Love Machine", to which