Pop music
Martha Hazel's favourites
Marcus Berkmann
Pop music is supposed to be a young person's game, so I have recently been introducing its pleasures to Martha Hazel Berkmann (born 16 July 1999). At first this was a purely pragmatic decision, after our serendipitous discovery that Leonard Cohen's 1984 album Various Positions made her fall into a deep and dreamless sleep. Obviously there are only so many times you can listen to Laughing Len in one 24-hour period, so we soon sought W expand her repertoire. My first try was an old Ry Cooder album I had been keen to play again. Those bluesy old tunes and bottleneck guitar solos that had failed so comprehensively to find a mass audience in the late 1970s and early 1980s were nonetheless just the ticket as far as Martha Hazel was concerned. She gurgled. She smiled. She filled her nappy. It was clear that we were on to a winner.
All this, though, begged another ques- tion. Was it possible that my daughter, at just six weeks of age, had intrinsically good taste? (Translation: the same taste as me.) Of all the terrors generated by parenthood — poverty, sleeplessness, forced purchase of Volvo, emergence of disastrous boyfriends in around 14 years' time — the possibility that she might have a lousy taste in music had never occurred to me. It should have. Children are now listening t° Radio One before they have stopped watching the Teletubbies. How long after Martha Hazel learns to talk will she be ask- ing for the new single by B*witched?
No point, though, in running before you can walk, or walking before you can crawl, or crawling before you can move at all. If she chooses to embrace hip hop whole- heartedly one day, that's up to her. More important now is to get her off to sleep. So I have spent a happy week trawling through my• record collection in an attempt to answer the age-old question: what do young people like nowadays?
First in the slot was the soundtrack to Notting Hill, which sent her off in seconds, but also had the same effect on us, which wasn't much use. (It's interesting to note the inclusion of quite a good Pulp song on the album, even though it didn't appear in the film. Good enough for us to listen to at home; not quite good enough for fat Amer- icans to hear in the cinema.) Everything you'd expect to work did so beautifully. Abba was a great success. `Gimme Gimme Gimme A Man After Mid- night,' I sang, like millions of heterosexual men before me, and she chortled with iron- ic pleasure. Nanci Griffith met with equal approval: she smiled at tracks one and two and usually dropped off during track three. Slightly more surprising was her predilec- tion for XTC's recent Apple Venus Volume 1. Andy Partridge's melodies never lead exactly where you expect them to, and his high keening voice is an acquired taste at the very least, but the Beatley lushness of the arrangements and the album's general air of rural calm have already seen off more than one tantrum. (I should stress that it works for adults too.) So I became more ambitious yet. The Lilac Time's Looking For A Day In The Night — a wonderful piece of work, by the way, with Stephen Duffy's best batch of tunes in years — induced slumber of Cohen- like depths, but things started to go wrong with Sting, as they so often do. Old jazzers never die, they just crowbar daft time signa- tures into their 'pop' records. This was Mer- cury Falling, his last, relatively tune-starved release. Martha Hazel looked dismayed. My judgment had deserted me. Alanis Morris- sette failed to improve her mood, and the Prodigy made her scream the house down.
At first sight this may seem a rather frivolous experiment, and that was certainly my own feeling as I embarked upon it. Fur- ther researches, though, reveal that most Pop-crazed fathers do something similar. One friend of mine told me to get her used to loud music as soon as possible, because then she'd sleep through anything. Another suggested late 1970s disco (It worked for Freddie'). It's a rite of passage both for father and for firstborn. The consequences can be hard to predict. Martha Hazel's favourite lullaby, which I must hum as I walk her up and down the stairs at five in the morning, is 'MI= Mmm Mmm Mmm' by the Crash Test Dummies. We might all argue with this choice, but at least it's not The Teddy Bears' Picnic'.. .
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