I Discover the Bee-Gees. Tippi Goes For Grunge. What the Heck?

No Toddly-Tunes today, on account of Marian Lord going off on another musical holiday, ostensibly to discover The Lost Rhythms Of The Nile, or some such nonsense. I decided I still needed a dose of music though, so while Mummy was up to her armpits in the laundry, I toddled into the sitting room and managed to switch on the stereo. I’ve done it before, though last time I also managed to pop a digestive biscuit into the CD player in a carefully planned experiment to see what happened. In fact, nothing much happened, especially afterwards when Daddy tried to play a CD in it. There was silence and then some nasty spiky noises. Daddy got tight-faced like he does sometimes and went off to stamp a bit and we now have a new CD player. Oops! Anyway, I left the CD player alone this time but popped on the radio to hear the dulcet tones of Ken Bruce on Radio 2, followed by what I can only describe as a peculiar high-pitched noise designed, surely, to attract all the dogs in the area and subject them to slick and highly compressed disco music. This extraordinary piece of four-to-the- floor, white-funk, art-pop was called ‘Staying Alive’ by someone called the Bee-Gees and the stratospheric singing was actually by a man using something called a falsetto voice. He was actually singing in a pitch higher than Tippi’s crying, and that is saying something. In fact, Tippi, comfortably ensconced in her Fisher-Price Precious Planet Happy Giraffe Bouncer and obviously not an automatic fan of the high-pitched stylings of the Gibb brothers, started crying the minute the track started and she was definitely about an octave lower. Normally, Mummy would have come in to comfort her but what with the washing machine, the tumble dryer and so on, she had obviously not heard. I tried but she just ignored me and Ken Bruce tried his best with the Bee-Gees being followed by a big piano and harmonies heavy Take That ballad, surely designed to soothe an unhappy baby but actually only leading to even more hysterical noises from Tippi, who must have found out that Robbie is re-joining, then he tired a song called Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, by Cindy Lauper, who actually sounds like a crying baby and not like she’s having any fun at all. It wasn’t until Ken introduced Smells Like Teen Spirit, by Nirvana that Tippi calmed down and I was treated to the highly surprising outcome of my baby sister falling gently asleep to the grungy sound of Kurt Cobain screaming at the top of his tuneful lungs and inciting a whole post-punk generation to riot, mayhem and the formation of a million sub-standard copy-cat bands. Rock-A-Bye Baby in its true sense. Ain’t music wonderful?

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