POLY LOVES: PANCAKE MOUNTAIN

A couple of years ago I broke my leg and ended up convalescing in a house with a 4-year-old who had a dictatorial reign over the TV remote. I watched a lot of CBeebies: Balamory, Big Cook Little Cook, Bob The Builder (obviously) and mine and the little one’s favourite, Boogie Beebies. For the uninitiated, Boogie Beebies’ hosts Nat and Pete make you dance to songs like Pirate Gang and Go Go Mango. I didn’t do much dancing. I was crippled. Keep up. But the point is, the little one did, and he loved it.

It was the best show on CBeebies by miles. Grown-up dancing is mostly rubbish because it’s all posing and posturing for others to see, but kids just throw themselves around because it feels good, and it’s the nicest and funniest thing in the world.

And then today I watched a YouTube clip of MIA teaching her dance moves to the kids on the wonderful Pancake Mountain. This led to a couple of hours of online PM catch-up, as the show’s been running since 2003 and has had everyone from Metric to Scissor Sisters to Arcade Fire to Juliette Lewis to… well, it’s had everyone. If Top Of The Pops had got a goat called Rufus Leaking to present and roped an audience of under-fives in, it might have stood a fighting chance.


The show’s creator, Scott Stuckey, got the show together in 2005. It airs sporadically on public access TV in Washington, though you can buy DVDs of episodes from the website. “Good music is good music no matter what your age,” he reasons. That’s true. But there are other reasons why a music show for kids works much better than one for adults.

First, stupid interview questions elicit the best responses. They’re more probing. They catch people off-guard and there’s no way bands will have a stock answer prepared for something like, “Where do you park the mothership?” (as Rufus once asked George Clinton). And they’re funny. I’m not interested in, “Tell me about your new album.” But I appreciate Rufus asking Shirley Manson, “Are you even happy when it’s a little bit cloudy?” I suspect she does, too.

Second, bands like White Stripes and Shonen Knife are childlike in so many ways that when they played the show, it looked like they’d come home. They loved it. Gigs should be made compulsory for under-10s and illegal for anyone older. Pancake Mountain’s Dance Parties prove this point.

And third, don’t you wish this was around when you were a kid? That you could say, “oh I was on TV playing drums with Iggy Pop when I was 6, and then Fugazi taught me to spell”. No? Shut up. You do a bit.

Here are some good bits from the show.

1. Metric hosting a Monster Hospital singalong.


2. Scissor Sisters doing karaoke to Aretha Franklin with Rufus.


3. Jenny Lewis really, really enjoying her Dance Party.


Buy DVDS for the young ones in your life, or else pretend you know some kids, buy it and then watch it yourself. It’s so good that it made me a bit sad for everything else. Rebecca