For kids from one to ninety-two... I'm From Barcelona
A strange thing happened on Friday. I went to a gig on my own and spent the show wishing I had with me not my wife, or a friend, or some fellow pop lover, but my six-year-old daughter. I spent large chunks of I'm From Barcelona's set at Jamm in Brixton thinking how much she'd have loved it.
The 29-strong band's theme song - We're From Barcelona - is already a favourite at home. Six-year-old Freya sings the first couple of lines - "I'm gonna sing this song with all of my friends / And we're out from... " - then points at two-year-old Gabriel, who bellows "BARCELONAAAA!", and the pair of them then bounce round the room like spectacularly uncoordinated Pan's People.
At their show, the band brought the children's party feel - balloons, confetti, bubble machines, kazoos, dozens of people bouncing around on stage - and never let it up. And everyone there - me included - grinned the whole way through. You'd have had to be a Meldrew not to.
But, as I stood there wishing I had Freya dancing on the barstool next to me, I also wondered: is this what our forefathers fought the rock'n'roll wars for? A music so stripped of rebellion, anger and sex that a dad would want his daughter to listen along with him - and not for snobbish purposes of "musical education"?
The band's own view - explained in last week's Film and Music - is that they are so out-of-step as to be punk rock, with their songs about treehouses, chicken pox and philately. They want to appeal to children, grandparents and everyone in between. I think that's a little bit of wishful thinking (except in so far as plenty of people will hate them like toothache).
Maybe, with rock's old purpose of defining generational differences having been destroyed by the fact that the damn music's hung around for 50 years, truly intergenerational music is the future. But if I'd been one of the 20-year-olds bouncing along on Friday night, I'd have been horrified at the notion that a 37-year-old would have liked to bring his six-year-old. Does rock need to exclude to flourish? A part of me thinks it does. What about you?
