Music in the car: kids vs grown-ups

The first rule of having the radio on in the car is that the kid is in charge. That means you can forget about listening to stations where anyone discusses news, politics or football. Or where anyone does any talking about anything at all, really.

I left the stereo tuned into Prime Minister’s Question Time on 5Live when I was picking up my almost-four-year-old daughter from nursery the other day. She was so affronted she looked like she was going to puke.

“What’s this?” she asked, incredulous.

“Well, it’s a lot of very important men and women in a big building talking about the rules we all have to live by…” I said enthusiastically, briefly deluding myself that I could engage her tiny, Disney-fixated mind with the rudiments of parliamentary procedure.

“It’s making me want to cry,” she said. “Put Kiss FM on.” Yep, you read right, and she’s not even four yet.

So the question we’re left with is: what can we play in the car that will be satisfactory for both us and the child? Family in-car audio experiences can be an effing minefield, but here are a few rules I have learnt to live by to keep the peace.

First: beware stations rich in the thrilling sounds of American R’n’B toe-tappers.

If it’s not Rihanna bragging about her seemingly insatiable appetite for aggressively-heavy petting, it’s Jason Deroulo going on about what he’s gonna do to his shorty right there in the middle of the club where everyone can probably see.

It’s always about ‘the club’ with these people. First they enter the club, then they scare the club, then they set the club on fire, then they do their hanky panky in the club’s bogs and, finally, they leave the club and head off to another, more exclusive club to do it all over again, only this time faster. It’s sickening.

Try explaining all of that to a toddler while trying to simultaneously negotiate a mini-roundabout during school-run rush hour. You’ll end up with three points on your license and six years worth of child psychologist bills.

Do: find stuff they can fit into their frame of reference.

I told my daughter Carol King’s Tapestry was a concept album about a lonely Princess imprisoned in a castle by a jealous stepmother. She bloody loves that record now. It’s added a new dimension to my own enjoyment of it also.

Don’t: try to get them to like the rubbish stuff you’re into.

If you start making strenuous efforts to get your kid into The Pixies or Elbow or whatever miserable, old-man bullshit you like listening to, you’re no better than your old man was when he tried getting you into Neil Young. And you remember what a dick you thought he was at the time, right?

Come on, there must be something you can both enjoy? If you’re really struggling, you could always tell your daughter that Radiohead’s impenetrable Kid A is in fact the soundtrack to a forthcoming Disney adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s Mrs Tiggywinkle.

Do: lie about lyrics.

“If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.”

“What does that mean, daddy?’ I was asked recently. What exactly were the Spice Girls trying to say? It was ambiguous, wasn’t it? They called it a statement of girl power but it could just as easily be interpreted as a decidedly un-feminist subservience to pornography-inspired male fantasies.

Either way, there was no way I was going to decipher the whole thing accurately while doing 60 on the A4 to Chiswick to a child who’s still too young to adequately wipe her own arse. “She’s basically saying that a boy can be mates with all of her mates as long as he doesn’t mind joining in their games,” I garbled. “What, like princess games?” she asked. “Yeah, that’s it,” I bluffed. “Anyway, shall we listen to Blondie for a bit now?”

Don’t: ever listen to a song more than 12 times.

Kids have a thing for repetition, don’t they? They don’t get the ‘less is more’ thing. It was on a grueling four-hour, traffic-laden trip back from Herefordshire last month that The Belle Stars broke a little piece of my soul that will probably never be repaired. Thirteen consecutive plays she made me do of their Eighties hit Sign Of The Times. Thirteen.

I can recite every lyric, every chord change, every faint use of background symbol by heart now. Know why? BECAUSE THE SONG HAS BEEN PLAYING ON A CONSTANT LOOP INSIDE MY STUPID BRAIN EVER SINCE! And it will never, ever stop. When it comes to your quest for the perfect family-friendly pop track, just be careful what you wish for.

Sam Delaney is the author of The Night Of The Living Dad: Confessions of a Shabby Father (published by John Murray). Available on Amazon