PUMP UP THE VOLUME

Esther Walker - 4 Aug 14

There wasn’t much music in my childhood home, for one reason or another. Sometimes if Dad was in a bad mood he’d put on some loud Wagner. Sometimes my sister would be playing on the piano. In the car, my mother listened to Vivaldi. There was no radio, no pop music (except our own, later on).

So it rarely occurred to me, after I left home, to put music on. I listened mindlessly to Capital FM in the car but that was that. My husband didn’t really listen to music either. Our house was quiet except for Radio 4.

Then I had my first baby, Kitty, and the silence in the house became crushing, deafening. The tick of the clock and then sshhh-grrr of the dishwasher were the only sounds. My friend Connie visited and brought me a bootlegged Adele CD. I put it on and played it and played it over and over again. I don’t even really like Adele, but it made sense to have music on, it made the minutes go by, singing along was something to do.

Music! I thought. Maybe that would help everything. I tried to remember the words to Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Favourite Things.

Then I got an iPhone about two years ago and occasionally played songs I dimly remembered from musicals though the tinny speakers. Then my second child, Sam, was born and my husband bought me a Beats Pill, which is a little portable wireless speaker. It is pink and looks horribly like a dildo, but it works brilliantly. “You play music to them,” he said. “I never think to. It would be so nice for them to have music around them more, in the way we never did as kids.”

Now we go nuts with our little pink Pill. Any indoor play session and every bath time we get our tunes on. We put them up LOUD. It’s A Hard Knock Life from Annie, Lonely Goatherd, Food Glorious Food! But it doesn’t all have to be kiddie stuff. We bop along to Sunshine by Labrinth, 9 to 5 by Dolly Parton, You’re So Cool from True Romance by Hans Zimmer, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s ukelele version of Over the Rainbow. And both my kids’ absolute super bonkers nutty favourite, Crazy From by Axel F. It was honestly worth having kids watching the two of them dance to it.

It’s also a sneaky way of introducing new films to Kitty, who is a bit resistant to anything she hasn’t seen before. But I can hook her into The Wizard of Oz with repeat playings of If I Only Had a Brain or Cinderella with The Work Song.

It will probably sound obvious and stupid to everyone else, but music lifts the mood in my house by about 85%. We do stupid dances, we feel better, we smile and sing. Before you know it, it’s bedtime. And then, the rather tragic thing is – I turn the music off and go about my evening in silence. Funny that. But with any luck, my kids will grow up with a different attitude. And I promise to dance with them to Crazy Frog for as long as they think it’s funny.

Read Esther’s other Selfish Mother posts here…

Esther Walker

Esther Walker is a freelance journalist for The Times, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and a beauty columnist for Sainsburys Magazine. Her two autobiographical books The Bad Cook and the Bad Mother are published by The Friday Project. She lives in London with her husband, writer and broadcaster Giles Coren, and their children Kitty, 5 and Sam, 3.

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