Simon Rushworth
Kids eh?
They wouldn’t spot a good tune if it came bundled in a Wii game with bells on.
Imagine you had to pick the best from the following list: Van Halen’s Jump; Lolly’s Radio; a tribal offering by some half naked chaps from Papua New Guinea.
For 99% of us there is only one winner and it features the best known keyboard lick in rock history before breaking into an Eddie Van Halen solo par excellence.
It’s one of those (very) soft metal anthems that managed to go mainstream and is a song which, even to this day, makes the odd appearance at wedding receptions and birthday parties the world over.
In fact everybody loves Jump.
Everybody, that is, except the under sixes. And even at that age serious questions have to be asked if there is a failure to spot pure quality.
Granted the version I’m talking about was performed by three cuddly rats (I think) called The Jingles.
The backing track was pure Van Halen but the vocals were more David Cameron than David Lee Roth.
Even so, there were the keyboards and the solo so, as with the original, the vocals didn’t really matter.
Yet the Pirate Posse – a group of junior judges plucked from obscurity to vote for their track of the day – remained unimpressed.
Thankfully they had a little more nous than to pick the sickly sweet Lolly. But not enough common sense to spot the music behind the mice. Or rats, or whatever.
Even my three-year-old daughter, who owns a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, loves Planet Rock and does a mean impression of Eddie (of Maiden, not Van Halen), insisted the Papuan tribesmen were best.
Now I accept van Halen are more VH1 Classic than CBeebies. And I should just be thankful that the music I love is getting played on a kids show called Space Pirates at 5.45pm.
But lessons need to be learnt.
If kids can’t spot the virtues of Van Halen at age two it’s a timebomb ticking. They might be able to play Dragonforce’s latest on Guitar Hero within 12 months.
But if they don’t understand what is so wonderful about Eddie (Van Halen, not Maiden) then all hope is lost. (Perhaps Slipknot do have a point, after all).
My daughter suggested I shouldn’t be so upset when the verdict was announced and The Jingles lost.
But then she didn’t witness the sad decline of Metal Hammer 15 years ago when the kids turned their back on classic rock for the evil of grunge…