My four-year-old daughter has kept a steady war of attrition going to extend her bedtime ritual as much as possible, likely to ensure that no siblings muscle in on her time. One facet of the ritual is that she has me sing her a few songs at lights out, but in recent months, a twist was added: she'll request a "mystery song" - one that she's never heard before, and if she likes it, she bestows it the honour of having it go on her Google Music playlist (the playlist of non-kiddy songs so we have something bearable to listen to on long drives).
It only took a few weeks to exhaust the memory bank of pop-punk classics I'd happily sing to a Canadian 4 year old, so I resorted to looking up lyrics on my phone. Sensing that this fool's errand was proving too easy thanks to the smartphone, she began to introduce complexity by requesting songs about certain topics, or even that feature specific words.
And then it happened. "Sing me a mystery song. That's from Ireland".
Easy peasy, right? There's four decades of U2 pablum that would easily tick the boxes. I could hum out Where the Streets Have No Name, or I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for, or One. I could hit the mark while edifying my daughter on pop classics she would surely encounter down the line.
But that's not what I thought of. For some reason my brain decided that the right answer would be "Danny Dyer" by the Rubberbandits; an often filthy song that amounts to a series of contrived, bizarre claims delivered in a piss-take cockney accent.
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| Looks child-friendly enough! |
These are some of the things Danny Dyer claims to have done in Danny Dyer by The Rubberbandits:
- Doing speed with aboriginies
- Eating the country of Greece while riding a saddled shark
- Urinating in a kettle
Father-of-the-year material that I am, I swapped out the lyrics on the fly with child-friendly stuff, and a few minutes later, bedtime ritual was over, and I was free to spend my evening not updating my blog for the 1,630th straight day.
The next day, I'm happily filling up my coffee cup in the kitchen, when my wife corners me and through gritted teeth asks me "why is our child singing "Danny Dyer, Danny Dyer, get 'im in a headlock?"
Our initial hopes that she would forget about it are completely dashed after a week of repeated asks. The Google Assistant refuses to play it for her, and she's never encountered this Content Filter issue before. Why can't she hear the song? We tell her there's no recording of it that survived on the internet because "it's from almost ten years ago and it's from Ireland, so nobody has a copy."
Undeterred, she asks me to ask my Irish friends. She asks me to track down the original artists (after asking if they're still alive). And more pressingly, she asks to sing the song to her night after night.
With more time to think about the lyrics I try to clean it up more, but I'm rebuked; "no Dad, that's not the right words". My toddler is castigating me for getting the censored words wrong, so I tell her that nobody has a trace of the real words, that it's been lost to time. The mystery around the song only grows and grows, it's now a part of her Irish heritage, it's even more important now that she hears it.
So I relent, and I tell her I'll try and find a copy. And I do what any loving father would in that situation: I use software trained by machine learning to split out the song into component stems; rewrite the lyrics, and inserted my own recorded vocals.
The results are... well, a bit of an abomination, as you can hear for yourself:
Abomination or not - she loved it, and it has been bestowed with the great honour of being #1 on her regular playlist, so I'm guaranteed to hear my awful iPad-recorded vocals multiple times a week until my kid tires of the concept of music itself. How long could that take?
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