Family car journeys are where musical seeds are sown. We revelled in the Gnu Song, the Bee Song and Bernard Cribbins's Right Said Fred
My parents headed back to Lancashire after the Easter weekend, and as they left I gave them a pile of records for the journey home ? Marcus Foster, Nathaniel Ratecliff, the new Felice Brothers among them ? supplies to spin out over the long road ahead.
I often think of how family car journeys are where our musical seeds are planted ? songs sown while you slept on the back seat, lines that stuck while you stared out at all the streetlights and the bus stops and the rooftops passing by. Our car was always alive with cassettes ? in the glove compartment and the seat pockets, jumbled in the footwell of the passenger seat, and some filed, surprisingly neatly, in a special plastic carrying case on the floor.
There were rock'n'roll compilations, offering everything from Bobby Vee's Rubber Ball to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers' Why Do Fools Fall in Love? There was a collection named Drive Time USA, made up of such giddy American classics as the J Geils Band's Centrefold and John Mellencamp's Jack and Diane.
At my Dad's behest, we would tune in to Sing Something Simple and Pick of the Pops and, to please my mother, permit her to play at least one side of the Keith Richards album Talk Is Cheap. We would listen to Steeleye Span and Fleetwood Mac, set off for Liverpool with Lou Reed, Richie Havens, or Roxy Music on the stereo, head home listening to the Paul Simon collection Greatest Hits, Etc ? each journey a delicate balance between carsickness and singing along to Kodachrome.
Many of my fondest memories of family car journeys seem to involve Supertramp ? the four of us driving south somewhere, singing along to Give a Little Bit, or sitting in a drizzly Southport car park watching the windscreen wipers sweep along in time to It's Raining Again. Later would come Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, Peter Gabriel's So, Paul Simon's Graceland. And when the tape player broke, we improvised: my brother knuckling the theme to BBC Test Match Cricket against the back seat door while I danced along beside him.
The album I associate most persistently with our family car journeys came before all that: a strange double cassette named All Aboard, and promised "24 Original All-Time Children's Favourites". This was not some mild-mannered clutch of lullabies and nursery rhymes to sedate travelling children, but a collection of tunes so thoroughly, Goonishly Technicolor that they imprinted for ever on your young mind the most wonderful music and the most extraordinary pictures.
On those car journeys we revelled in the Gnu Song, the Bee Song, and the Hippopotamus Song, as well as to Bernard Cribbins "heaving and complaining" his way through Right Said Fred, and Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren flouncing and lusting through Goodness Gracious Me. There was Burl Ives singing I Know An Old Lady, Dick James's blustering Robin Hood, and Buckingham Palace, written by AA Milne and sung by Ann Stephens.
There were glimpses, too, beyond all the glorious mud and busy, busy bees, into an unsettling adult world ? the extraordinary sadness of Two Little Boys, as sung by Rolf Harris, and all the tragic crumpled passion of Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West), as recounted by Benny Hill.
As I thought of my parents headed north with the stereo on, I tried to think what those family car journey soundtracks have left with me ? beyond a softness for milkmen, a weakness for the hippopotamus and a curious fondness for driving in the rain. And I suppose that with the gentle whirr and click of those early cassettes, there was planted in me the notion that in this short, sweet life, there are few things more glorious than music on a car stereo, and that wherever you may be going, you should always take a song with you.
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