Dan Carrier’s Dig It Sound System – the tricycle was converted into a DJ booth, with a trailer added along with a small generator for power and some speakers

YOU are likely to hear it before you see it, but I hope once Dig It has crossed your path, you’ll remember it.

It does not move at any great speed, and as my knees have got creakier, the pace has become increasingly laid-back: the Dig It Sound System is a fully operational, scrap wood-built, tricycle and trailer, pedal-pulled mobile sound system that has been entertaining people for three decades.

As a child I was fascinated with go-karts and ached to have the engineering know-how to stick a lawnmower or washing machine engine to four wheels and zoom off. I would scour skips for old Silver Cross prams, whose wheels I would hacksaw off and then attach to planks of wood to build the classic box car go-karts.

Looking back it is hardly surprising that, one year at Glastonbury, half my week­end was taken up following round an extraordinary contraption called the Rinky Dink Sound System. This pedal-pushed box of delights looked like something out of Lewis Carroll’s imagination – and I wanted one.

A spell at university in the 1990s cemented a love of bassy music played through large speakers – I was in Brighton, which had a lively free party scene. I eventually joined with friends to set up our own sound system and from there it didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to get it mobile.

‘Dig It’ at the Parliament Hill Fields bandstand

A trip to Nicaragua pushed the idea forward. The country has a culture of parades and carnivals that have sound systems strapped to the back of pick-up trucks. It looked too much fun, but rather than buy a rundown pick-up which would be well out of my price range and impractical, the Rinky Dink concept seemed a better bet.

Dig It as a mobile entity was born when I saw the frame of an old Dutch tricycle slowly rotting away in a front garden. I plucked up the courage to knock on the door and offered to tidy up the front yard free of charge if I could have the rusting monstrosity. A hard bargain was driven – not only did I do some back-breaking garden­ing, but they also decided to charge me for the wreck. It was money well spent.

The tricycle was converted into a DJ booth, and then a trailer constructed using a wheel kit which I modified. A neighbour was converting a loft into a living space and had a skip full of flooring. That, and some poles that held estate agents’ “for sale” signs were purloined. I got a small generator for power, some fat speakers and the mobile Dig It was born.

My friends and I have taken it on plenty of marches, protests and demonstrations; we’ve pedalled it into fields at festivals, rolled into street parties and led parades.

Over the years it’s been tweaked and improved, redecorated and beefed up, and this year it has a new member of the family. I have embarked on a new project to build Dig It Mark II. I found a strange-looking frame dumped in the depths of Sainsbury’s underground car park opposite the Tribune’s Camden Town HQ a few months ago and being, a) a hoarder of junk that would make Steptoe and Son look like Stacey Solomon had been round with her TV show about tidying up hoarders’ mess and, b) having a rather active imagination when it comes to things on wheels, I just had to drag it home.

It is a tandem tricycle, made by Peugeot from what a quick internet search suggests dates from the early 1970s. A neighbour said he remembered standing in a market in Istanbul in 1967 and meeting a pair of Parisian hippies who had cycled all the way from France on such a contraption.

My plan to stick a 2,000-watt sound system and DJ booth on the back means such distances might be verging on the physically impossible. But if anyone fancies sponsoring me to see how far I can get, pedalling accompanied by a favoured soundtrack pushes you further than you think possible.