. . . on bringing the music back
I WAS UPSTAIRS, drowning in a sea of odd socks during that tumultuous 10 minutes before everyone leaves the house for their day jobs, when I heard what sounded like music from the hall. This was most unusual.
While it would be going too far to say that the day my daughters were born was the day the music died, the reality is that since they came along, music designed for adult consumption has been sadly lacking in our house. And now, suddenly, here was some music rising up through the floorboards like a once loved but forgotten friend.
I don’t know how it happened. It’s as though we decided music appreciation was incompatible with parenting. You can’t really count nursery rhymes and made-up nonsense songs and Disney tunes, the fact is it’s been a long time since Dylan or The Beatles or even Beyoncé were given free rein around here. We forgot about our devotion to the Dexy’s album Don’t Stand Me Down and anything by Duke Special. We let the music fade out.
Occasionally we remembered that as well as being parents we were also people who quite liked listening to Sinead O’Connor and Sufjan Stevens and we’d crank up the iPod to listen at night while ironing. But it was always while they were in bed because I never really felt comfortable with foisting our musical tastes on them. Also, my boyfriend likes The Beautiful South and REM. Who knows where prolonged exposure to that kind of thing might lead? We did try once. We used to play Beyoncé’s All The Single Ladies on a loop when the children were very small, for example, because we noticed them jigging along when it came on. And one day when they were sick a black doctor visited with his battered leather medical bag. Beyoncé was on and he stood in our kitchen and did a funky dance and sang about putting a ring on it which floored us all. The babies were mesmerized as the doc grooved around them with a stethoscope in his ears.
This experience made us realise that adult music and children might mix. We tried for a while to be hipster parents putting on Leonard Cohen in the car but the children nearly broke the windows screaming blue murder for the seminal audio book It Was You, Blue Kangaroo.
Then a few months ago the iPod breathed its last and wasn’t replaced because after a brief consultation with the REM fan, it was deemed non-essential to the smooth running of the household. So apart from occasional bursts of Lyric FM and once a year Christmas FM, we gave up. Gave in. Gave music the old heave-ho.
I don’t think it’s the same for everyone. We have friends who watch MTV with their breakdancing toddlers but ours have no interest in poor old Rihanna. We have other friends who put their favourite classical music on every weekend and if the children don’t want to listen they can leave the room. My daughters used to tolerate me singing Adele’s Someone Like You and Popular from the musical Wicked at bedtime but now they scream “nooo, not adult songs” so I just do Two Little Boys and Tooralooraloora instead.
A few weeks ago we met children’s clothes designer Lucy Clarke. It turned out that when she was 14 and at school in Loreto on the Green in Dublin she was in a band called Chicks. I asked her for a CD so I could hear what an all-girl teenage punk band from Dublin and dressed head-to-toe in second-hand gear from Eager Beaver sounded like. We played it in the car on the way home not expecting the music to be tolerated by our back-seat passengers beyond the first drum riff. But something strange happened. They cocked their heads. Listened as though in a trance. When we went to turn it off, because in fairness the first track was called F**k Music and we were being Good Parents, they lost the plot entirely. So now Chicks is all we are allowed listen to in the car. We shout Punk Music to drown out the swear word and marvel at how, within a week, they knew every word to every song.
“I’m from Dublin, I’m not Californian, I wanna be delphonic, get down on it,” they sing like a couple of Billy Barry kids gone bad. It turns out they are devoted three-year-old fans of late 1990’s Irish girl punk. Who knew? The music bursting through the floorboards the other day was less edifying. One of the children had got their hands on one of those horrendous singing toys I had hidden away for reasons of maintaining good mental health. You push a button and these two manic yellow furry ducks start moving around and singing a strangulated version of Walking On Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. The girl who had pushed the button was waving in time to the music and appeared to be enjoying herself. This is what three years of music deprivation will do to a person.
So I’ve decided to bring the music back. I’m dusting down the record player and investing in some nice expletive-free Carpenters or Dusty Springfield or Simon Garfunkel on vinyl. Hang the expense. This is a musical emergency. And while they might protest through the first hundred plays of The Boxer, I’ve a feeling they’ll thank me some day.
In other news . . . If you haven’t watched the compelling story of Brigid Flanagan and the Jack Jill Children’s Foundation log onto jackandjill.ie. It’s part of a national campaign to raise urgent funds for the foundation which provides home nursing care to the families of children with brain damage. To donate €5 text “We Care” to 57034