It’s No 1, it’s Top of the Tots

“I think it’s really brought out the best in all the artists who got involved,” enthuses the trumpeter Mick Cooke, of Belle & Sebastian, who compiled the album. “I don’t think there’s another album like it.”

He’s right. If there was, I would know about it by now. As a music fan fighting to ensure that my children have a modicum of taste, Colours are Brighter comes as valuable ammunition against the tween-pop tyranny of Hi-5 and the soon-to-be-everywhere High School Musical soundtrack.

In the past five years I’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that I can take pride in the songs my kids like. At times I’ve created fictional back-stories to records, with a view to tickling Dora and Eavie’s curiosity. Hence, in their world, the Beatles’ Help! was inspired by the time John Beatle ate too many pies and got stuck in a manhole. I enlivened Neil Young’s Helpless by convincing them that the line, “Big birds flying across the sky” actually referred to Big Bird from Sesame Street.

But possibly my greatest achievement happened just a month ago, when I convinced Dora and Eavie to come to the Big Chill festival on the basis that Vashti Bunyan — fairy godmother to the nu-folk vanguard — would be performing.

For this one, of course, I didn’t need to make up a back-story. Months before I had told them about how Bunyan’s legendary “lost” album Just Another Diamond Day came to be made; about her two-year odyssey by horse-drawn caravan to a commune in the Outer Hebrides; about the subsequent album that chronicled her journey; about its abject commercial failure, which effectively put paid to Bunyan’s musical dreams; and about its subsequent reappraisal 30 years later, which lured the singer out of retirement. When Bunyan performed her afternoon set at Big Chill my daughters sat through it gazing on adoringly.

Quite whose interests I had at heart here is something I have yet to work out. There’s a fine line between giving your children a musical education and brainwashing them into liking all your favourite records. In my defence, though, I would argue that I’m less guilty of this than the late composer and guitarist Freddie Phillips. Best known for his lovely theme tunes to the TV series Camberwick Green and Trumpton, Phillips was a staunch advocate of modern classical music. His own children were raised not to some gentle guitar meditation such as might accompany the sound of Windy Miller turning his mill, but to the music of Igor Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez. “Children have no preconceptions about music,” Phillips once told me. “Play Boulez to an adult and they’re faced with the challenge of unlearning all the things they’ve been taught to regard as ‘proper’ music.”

If that really is the case, I fear I’ve already instilled in my children an orthodoxy that they may never be able to shake off. To confirm this I play them two songs by Scott Walker from opposite ends of the singer’s solo career. Recently described by one reviewer as “an exploration of the shell game as existential metaphor coupled with the motif of dermatological malady”, Psoriatic is one of the more challenging sound-collages from Walker’s recent album, The Drift. His version of Jacques Brel’s Jackie, on the other hand, is a breathlessly gleeful thing whose protagonist longs to be “cute — in a stupid-ass way”.

The former lasts approximately one minute before Eavie attempts to “make that silly man stop”. The latter has both girls galloping around the room like horses. And, if they were really honest with themselves, every Walker apologist in the offices of the furrow-browed music monthly The Wire would probably do the same.

This, of course, is the wonderful thing about playing one’s records to small children. Broadly speaking, tiny people have no concept of cool. And as long as my youngest continues to wet her pants roughly once a week, I suspect that this will continue to be the case. That’s what makes them such excellent guinea-pigs.

Children are no less adept at exposing the shallowness of a mass critical backlash. Right now, it’s easier to find someone who will own up to being a Gary Glitter fan than a lover of Travis. But, during Eavie’s first year, no CD would pull her out of a tantrum and into a serene reverie faster than Travis’s The Man Who (1999).

Phillips might not have approved, but even he would have plumped for Travis over the bafflingly popular Punk Rock Baby series of CDs, which is designed to bridge the gap between your baby’s apparent needs and the sensibilities of the post-punk dad. The outspoken Phillips rightly described ambient plinky-plonky versions of Smells Like Teen Spirit as the equivalent of puréed mush.

But, for the parent eager to find music for children, it’s a market that remains sparsely populated. The world is full of children and parents, so why are there so few decent records aimed at them? Charlie Leach is the managing director of Whatmusic, a brand consultancy firm that sells compilations ideas to record labels and chainstores. “Children don’t have a disposable income,” he says, “so everyone is marketing to the mums, selling them what they think the mums will think their kids will want.

“And they’re probably right. Many mums probably do assume their youngsters will want something simple and won’t understand ‘adult’ music — whereas in reality the kids probably have a better intuitive appreciation of great music than us adults because the marketing and the celebrity and the peer pressure and the ‘cool’ factor that warps the average adult’s mind all go straight over their heads. The result is bad tempers all round rather than excitement and bonding.”

In America, though, things have moved on a little. Having failed on several occasions to make a tolerable record for grown-ups, the Boston nerd-rock laureates They Might Be Giants made a great one for kids. Released in 2004, Here Come the ABCs channelled the spirit of vintage Sesame Street into songs such as E Eats Everything and Who Put the Alphabet (in Alphabetical Order?).

The Washington-based indie label RAS has lured revered reggae artists such as Gregory Isaacs, Bunny Wailer and Freddie McGregor to contribute to its Reggae For Kids series. Jason Falkner, formerly of Jellyfish, released two volumes of his instrumental labour of love, Bedtime with the Beatles. Even the Smithsonian Institution got in on the act with Leadbelly Sings For Children. As long as your kids don’t know that the friendly old man singing Boll Weevil and Pig Latin Song served time for murder, it’s a way to make bedtime go that bit quicker.

Back in the UK, though, it’s a different story. Colours are Brighter stands virtually alone in the browser marked “not-at-all-depressing kiddiepop”. Saint Etienne’s much-touted children’s album Up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire never surfaced beyond an excellent six-track “teaser” EP given away with last year’s Tales from Turnpike House. Erasure are said to be working on tracks for a children’s album, but a spokesperson says that “nothing has been recorded”. Trunk Records’s recent Fuzzy Felt-Folk tapped into a vein of slightly unsettling acoustic music favoured by early Seventies kids’ programmes.

By and large, though, it’s been slim pickings. Which is a shame, given that we have all, at some point, spent a tense car journey with a child and a tape of some failed folksinger attempting to suppress their fury at the hand that life has dealt them with or The Wheels on the Bus and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

“I briefly dabbled with one of those,” admits the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon (who contributes a lovely chamber-pop medley of Winnie-the-Pooh songs to Colours Are Brighter). “My daughter was fine with it, but I just wanted to throttle someone.”

Ultimately, the only course of action that might get the discerning pop parent through these tricky years is a little lateral thinking. There are, in fact, hundreds of excellent children’s songs out there — and you already know them. Walk over to your record collection and look at it with a child’s eyes. Scour the track listings. It’s all there! What’s not to understand about Should I Stay or Should I Go by the Clash? What aspect of the Police’s Walking on the Moon will a four-year-old fail to understand? Finally, of course, there’s Vashti Bunyan, heroine of my greatest bedtime story. What does she think of the idea that her Hebridean adventure is percolating into the interior world of a new generation? Speaking on the phone from Seattle, where she is rehearsing for a headlining American tour, she seems amused by the notion. “It’s wonderful, but it’s also a little ironic. The reception given to the album was so distressing that I just wanted to put music behind me. I don’t think I even sang my children to sleep.”

The good news, however, is that closure might be just around the corner. “I’m expecting my first grandchild in the next few weeks, so I’ll probably sing a few of those songs to him.”

Colours Are Brighter is released on October 16 by Rough Trade, all proceeds going to Save The Children

Paphides’ Choice: anthems for weenies

The Clash Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Killer tempo-change alloyed to we’ve-all- been-there sentiments.

Van Halen Jump

Hard to believe this was meant for grown-ups.

Talking Heads Road to Nowhere

A concept hilarious to little ones.

Vashti Bunyan Jog Along Bess

Flower-folk tribute to the singer’s trusty animal pals.

R.E.M. Superman

A good alternative for anyone too law-abiding to illegally seek out Furry Happy Monsters, their Sesame Street version of Shiny Happy People.

Focus Hocus Pocus

Yodeltastic jazz-rock.

Queen Bicycle Race

Like any six-year-old, he loves to ride his bike.

The Sippy Cups She’s a Rainbow

Ace cover of the Stones’ flawed psych-pop paean to all the pretty colours, man.

The Lilac Time The Girl Who Waves at Trains

Pastoral pop loveliness with hints of E. Nesbit.

The Toy Dolls Nellie the Elephant

Gonzo-punk makeover of kids’ classic.

The Automatic Monster

Traffic jams can only be improved by the opportunity to sing “What’s that coming over the hill/ Is it a monster?” Los Papines Hello Goodbye Cuban take on Paul McCartney’s Fab musings on opposites.

The Cure The Lovecats

Their 1984 hit Caterpillar works just as well.

Jonathan Richman Vincent Van Gogh

Far more moving than you would expect.

The Police Walking on the Moon

Sting’s most child-friendly moment.

Kaiser Chiefs Na Na Na Na Na

Sentiments with which we can all empathise.

You can hear this list as an iMix, titled Accidental Children’s Songs, on www.itunes.com.