Kids on the coast

By Aleney de Winter

This week in parentville I attempted some toddler training. And by toddler training I mean training my son to behave more like a toddler and less like a degenerate rocker.

Even while still snuggled in the womb it was obvious that, though our son would love the nightlife, he certainly wouldn’t love to boogie. The banshee sound of a Bee Gee’s falsetto was enough to result in a distressed frenzy in utero, so much so that we have suspicions that his early arrival was in no small part due to panic induced by back to back Bee Gee’s at a wedding we attended the night before.

And yet, at the same time we realised that our already bizarre unborn boy would fall into a contented sleep whenever ‘Wild Thing’ was played. Clearly this was a child that was born to rock and the easiest way to settle my newborn rocker was for his mummy to softly sing him to slumber reassuring the tiny little wild thing that he really did make her heart sing and really did make everything groovy, quite.

My tiny music man embraced every imaginable incarnation of rock’n’roll. Traditional lullabies drove him crazy, but Bernard Fanning could calm him immediately. There was a brief foray into Brit pop, as he banged the drum to the Stone Roses before a naturally occurring faux-hawk serendipitously coincided with a love of punk classics that saw him dodging Spanish bombs with The Clash and creating anarchy with The Sex Pistols. While the Wiggles left him cold, Jimmy Hendrix and the Doors lit his fire. There was a brief ‘Bob’ phase when he mellowed out with Mssrs. Marley and Dylan until Raging Against the Machine and couch-diving to Them Crooked Vultures became his raison d’etre.

And while he knows and loves singing along to many a children’s nursery rhyme, when it comes to listening it’s a whole different story. Concerned that he might be missing out on some important toddler rite-of-passage that would impair his development I have dutifully spent the last few weeks revisiting music for minors to see if I could convince my mini madman that it was where things were at for hip and happening toddlers.

My attempts were met with a huffy “No mummy, turn that yuck off just right now!” And so, always one to do as I’m told, I did just that. I have accepted defeat and instead of a houseful of kiddie’s tunes have had The Jam song, A Town Called Malice on repeat for several hours at the behest of our small but insistent in-house DJ, as he dances wildly about. And while Mummy certainly prefers his musical choices to songs about mashed potatoes – it would be nice if my obsessive boy rocker would, just once, listen to a whole album!