WOEBOT

When you have children you find that you listen to their music quite a lot of the time. At home on television, in the kitchen on CDs, on their little tape recorders in their bedrooms, in the car especially. Never buy your children CD players by the way because the CDs get mashed to fuck. I learnt this the hard way. C90s are the only way to go because they're so sturdy, OK the tape can jam in the player but you can always thread it out of the machine and if needs be splice the ends together in the event of a breakage. This is the same reason they're still big in the harsh climatic conditions of The Third World. I expect everyone will be able to cast their minds back to gluing or sellotaping cassettes back together and the ritual of correctly disassembling and reassembling the case itself, each element having to be in precisely the right slot or the cassette will fail to work and the satisfaction of a correctly repaired cassette.

My babies have always had well-stocked collections of music, it's the least I can do, right? But I've resolutely avoided pandering to my own tastes, so no Classical Avant-Garde Music. I've always tried to think what it would be that they'd like. Subsequently we listen to lots of Disney music, the divine Mary Poppins Soundtrack was a big favorite of ours, the Jungle Book Soundtrack, but also lesser drek like songs from Beauty and The Beast and The Lion King. There's a CD by this lady called Vanessa King who runs the London Symphony Orchestra Discovery Workshops which runs out of the converted St. Luke's church beside our house called "Jemma's Journey and Abi's Adventure" which they love, and which is (if you can get past the kiddie flavor) exceptionally musical and charming. Actually if you know someone with small children, or have them yourself I couldn't recommend it highly enough. The furthest I go towards indulging myself is HMV's excellent two CD collection of Children's Classics. Funnily enough the most randomly persistent emails I've got since the dawn of WOEBOT was about these songs, at least until I edited the entry.

Listening to songs like the woman's hour choir singing "All things bright and beautiful" and "The Laughing Policeman" one feels an unbearable nostalgia for times before Rock'n'Roll when life was simpler. I mean, when would a Policeman ever laugh these days? When he busted your big sister's prostitution racket or found that tiny rock of crack you tried to secrete in your shorts? That innocence is long gone. It was funny reading through Joe Boyd's excellent "White Bicycles" recently and his account of Dylan's electrification at Newport, a moment Boyd not inaccurately believes to be the birth of Rock (even if that account hardly does his own reputation any harm...). Boyd remarks that though the crowd, who until that moment had been innocently righteous folkies, were thrilled by Dylan's racket, there was apparently a strong sense in the air that something that something had been lost. I guess I think lyrical obscenity is a good thing and as for sonic barbarity, bring it on baby, but yunnuh a little piece of me would be quite happy without the likes of Chamillionaire (bad example I guess cos it's just so fucking formulaic)

We have lots of tapes by The Wiggles. The Wiggles TV show goes out on Nick Jr in the UK and we've watched it with the kids lots. I like to watch TV with my babies, I don't want to just plonk them in front of it like k-punk's archetypal pot-smoking parents plugging their children into Teletubbies. Consequently I know all about all the programs, Dora, Diego, Little Bill, Little Bear, Charlie and Lola, Boogie Beebies, Bob The Builder, Tikabilla, Balamory, The Tweenies (a personal favorite, it seems I enjoy The Tweenies more than my children), Lazytown (unbelievably catchy Euro-Trance-Pop tunes), Pingu, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Brum, Big Cook Little Cook. I know my shit, I'm telling you. The Wiggles are an Australian invention and Tim Finney and Jon Dale will be able to tell you all about them. It was as though someone re-scripted The Monkees for the under sixes but was sure to leave out anything even vaguely sexualised or culturally surreptitious (we all know what happened to The Monkees right? Head etc)

Conventional post-teen wisdom (which actually I suspect Jon and Tim don't subscribe to...) would have it that The Wiggles are a travesty. But actually I think they're wonderful. Greg, Murray, Jeff and Anthony are so unremittingly good-humoured, so cheerful in such a uncalculated manner, their songs so daftly hooky that I find them irresistible. When we found out in January that they were coming to London I was even toying with getting FACT to let me interview them for the magazine. This morning we all set off in the van to the Hammersmith Apollo to see them play their one and only UK show on their world tour. The last time I'd been to the Apollo was in 1987 when I broke out of school on my own to see The Fall on their Frenz Experiment tour and was sick on booze in the bushes. Funnily enough my wife buys underwear off Brix these days.

The place was packed in a ratio 8:4:1 (children:mothers:fathers) The band were their charming beatific selves and played all the big hits you don't know and I love. Opening with my personal favorite "Rock-A-Bye-A-Bear" and trotting through "Wags the Dog", "Quack, Quack, Quack, Cockeldoodle Do", "The Good Ship Feathersword", "Dorothy The Dinosaur", "Hot Potato". Lulu was having a wail of time, wiggling like crazy. Sam seemed to wail mostly. I sensed the adults around me were surprised when I knew all the words. My own personal highlight came three quarters of the way through the performance when Murray and Jeff ventured into the audience to collect roses for Dorothy the Dinosaur to eat (Ah ha! Your intertextual Rock knowledge just deserted you!) Catherine raced downstairs to the stalls with Lulu to meet Jeff.

Murray, who dresses in red, is about seven foot tall and plays the guitar, started to make his way through the circle. Sam is too young to really appreciate their celebrity, but I used him as an excuse to schlep over and accost him in my usual star-fucked fashion. Up close Murray seemed gigantic, his hands looked like paddles, he was sweating profusely and looked unbelievably stressed-out, a very empty grin plastered on his face, his eyes, bent at the edges speaking volumes. The best I could manage was a very heartfelt: "Welcome to London Murray" to which he replied: "Thanks cobber" (actually he just said "Thank you.") I'll be honest I felt kinda disappointed. This evening I put myself in his shoes. Jet-lagged, far from home, alone in the back of a theatre he wasn't sure how to escape from, without his entourage (the legendary Big Red Car was left at home and they were working a pickup band), unsure as to the degree of cynicism of the adults around him, dressed in his standard-issue red sweater, clutching multiple huge bouquets of roses. Jeez mate, I'd be pretty fucking stressed out as well.