For all Talking Heads’ – and Brian Eno’s – clean lines, ‘Life During Wartime’ has a touch of the melodramatic. Equating living in Manhattan with enduring life in a city under siege is extending a metaphor until it’s stretched enough to believe in itself, but David Byrne is a panic-eyed master of the paranoid, and here he and the rest of the ‘Heads scratch and jerk until they’re a twitching bug of insecurity.

Maybe New York felt like that in 1979 if you were strung out enough. After all, they were CHANGING THE FACE OF POPULAR MUSIC. “You oughta know not to stand by the window,” not while the style mag snipers are perched on the rooftops.

But how does it feel, coming to Talking Heads cold in 2012? “My head is talking right now,” is Junior’s literal response. More abstractly she and her sisters dissolve into a mess of muso faces and electroshock shimmies – a reasonable reaction to ‘Life During Wartime”s troublefunk.

After it fades there’s a moment of reflection before Junior decides the track is “in the middle”. But they were at the vanguard! They were pushing rock forward! “It sounds like a song from the olden days.”

There are more obvious BowiEno collabs but when we got onto ‘Warszawa’ there was a pretty poor reception all round. I’m not wild about it myself. I prefer my glacial synths with Jim Kerr making an arse of himself over the top.

I don’t actually, but I liked saying it.

Anyway, to add to the – ahem – car crash of this whole experiment, I had meant to play ‘Sound And Vision’. The plan was scuppered by Junior arguing about which cereal she was going to have for its entire three minutes. We then trumped the futility of this row by debating who was playing guitar on ‘Always Crashing…’ – Robert Fripp or Carlos Alomar? – for its entire three and a half minutes. Turns out it was Ricky Gardiner.

Nobody’s a winner. But this, like most of Low’s first side, is crisply depressing and that’s about all you can ask for.

A bit of music we could really experiment with, but first some questions for Junior:

Do you like ambient music? “I’m more like *mimes thrashy guitar and disco dancing*”

Do you understand what Brian Eno’s trying to do here [I'm reading out the sleevenotes]? “No.”

And so she shouldn’t. A six-year-old is after constant stimulus, not a “tint” to the environment or space within which to think. If possible, thinking should be kept to a minimum. But I think Music For Airports is quite beautiful – whether or not it’s just sitting in my earbuds, not being too intrusive when I’m writing about something completely different – so it’s worth pursuing Eno’s enquiries. “Ambient Music…must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” he says, so is it?

Junior walks around the living room attempting to ignore it. Did it work? “I couldn’t hear it.”

But when you listen, is it interesting? “No.”

For Lent this year, we at Jukebox Junior are giving up all music that isn’t connected in some way to Brian Eno. To celebrate the Enoxification of our Lord, if you will. I wonder what that involves. A patina of magic dust maybe.

So let’s start at the very beginning (or near enough). After all, as Julie Andrews – another artist capable of doing amazing stuff with just a spoonful of sugar – says, it’s a very good place to start. On For Your Pleasure’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, Eno stands at the back wearing a feather boa and “playing tapes”. What would ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ be without tapes? It would be an airless piece of prog with a mannered Bryan Ferry vocal. With Eno’s tapes, it’s an an airless piece of prog with a mannered Bryan Ferry vocal and some whooshy phasing (technical term). Genius.

Junior’s not up on sound beds and production jiggery-pokery (she will be by the time we reach Easter), but from the audio alone she detects a man gritting his teeth as he plays guitar. Phil Manzanera’s fretwork is clearly so meaty it’s almost corporeal. She decides there’s “a little too much guitar” and the song is “too quiet” when Ferry dominates. Bring on the tapes then. Examining the inner sleeve, she declares Andy Mackay “the fashion one, the cool one” and points out that Eno “looks like a girl”. We’re on our way.

It’s not my fault, it just happened. The little worm has probably used that line too.

Anyway, I searched my conscience and found that this is a Benny Benassi record, so all good. And all good it is – I’ve not heard a record that so perfectly captures early 90s club euphoria since… since…

Read not too closely between the lines and this is deeply narcissistic, of course. Could Chris be singing about himself, kids? Isn’t he a little bit beautiful inside as well? Maybe he has rather smashing internal organs. Still, taken purely as an audio experience ‘Beautiful People’ is dashing, thrilling, direct, hangs on a superb hook and is about the only rave-synthed tune of the last five years that sidesteps a cheesy doom. Come on, it does.

All these songs are purely audio experiences for Junior. That’ll change, but right now she and her sisters can just enjoy chanting “Everywhere, everywhere…” and puzzle over how Brown can be singing both the title and the woah-ohs. We’ll discuss studio techniques another time.

Anyway, we agree on this one – “I like it the most of all the others. Bom-bom-bom ['Super Bass'] and live your life [er, this] are *thumbs up*, the others are *middling thumbs* and *thumbs down*.” So there.

Next up, 1980 or 2002.

there’s a fire going out,
but there’s really nothing to the south
swollen orange and light let through
your one piece swimmer stuck to you

I think this is ‘Astral Weeks’, and the whole album is a son of Astral Weeks the album. It has a poetry wrapped up in the fug of memory, of magic, heartbreak and lost places. ‘Calgary’ is a rising storm with hooks too beautiful to remain composed in the face of, and anyway, Justin Vernon could make the TV Burp theme sound like a distraught elegy for Old Yeller.

Junior picks this up. “Oh, I know this one. Is it about someone dying?” Well, who the hell knows? It’s the impact that matters. As for her opinion – “The same thought that you think” – she’s learning Iverese.

So it should be No.1. It’s my favourite song of the year, but top spot goes to clearly the best single of the year. And it’s a disgrace.

Now I love a nine-minute record that doesn’t waste a second as much as the next man, so no doubt we’re all delighted to see this has placed so high. My wife says it’s very me, by which I’m sure she means it’s funky, addictive and a joy to have around the house rather than over-polite, unsexy and called Jeremy.

Jeremy Greenspan isn’t a very rock’n'roll name, is it? Further evidence from Junior: “I don’t like the singing. It’s not rock’n'roll like ‘Firework’.” Well, nothing’s as rawk as Katy Perry. Not even P!nk. Junior’s in the mood to examine this record, dismissing a banana ripple for more foodstuff-based suggestions: “What about one potato, two potato? You rip the skin off them too.” There’s, um, food for thought for Junior Boys’ fifth album.

In the end I catch her doing a strutting hip dance – moving like Jagger once more – in secret. That’s Junior Boys really, dance music to be enjoyed in private.

To deliver this skintight streak of acid soul, Hercules use three singers: one to, well, sing the song, one to say “Get up, get up”, the third to say “Ca-con-con”. Staggering. The last days of disco indeed.

It’s all very Fingers Inc and diva-defiant but goes to show just how fresh this kind of thing still sounds. There’s no way you can’t at least jerk your head around to ‘My House’. In a way though, it was a false start for an album that never quite catches fire like their wonderful debut; maybe that’s the absence of Antony, but I think these three singers do a fine job even with their ill-balanced burden.

Or do they? Over to Junior: “It’s a bit good. Not the singing, the instruments – they suit the singing.” I wouldn’t like to work out those royalties.

A beautiful piece of pop for a lad who deserves it. I mean, my my my, he’s like pelican fly.

Junior sings along while doing some colouring, a good occupation when you’re listening to day-glo Nicki. She should be able to brighten up the world with her sunburst music alone, but no harm helping her along a bit.

He’s also got that boom badoom boom boom badoom boom bass.

There might’ve been a clue in the purloining of ‘No More “I Love You”s’ for ‘Your Love’, but I wasn’t expecting Minaj to get quite so sweet on someone. She wasn’t meant to make the love song for all the little girls to sing.

Like it, Junior? “Yeah, boom boom boom.”

I posted this in July (then cunningly hid it):

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As the planet’s leading Coldplay apologist, I feel compelled to defend ‘Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall’ against the harsh barbs hurled in its path. Yes, it’s ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’ by way of Big Country by way of – what? – Bizarre Inc? Yes, Chris Martin’s whipped his rhyming dictionary out again, now thumbed to a cinder. Yes, its rave riff is a now-allegedly-customary lift. But come on, it’s credited. Now. What matters, to me at least, is its life-affirming kinetic drive, its splurge of non-specific euphoria and determination to grasp that pop nettle again and finally consign the blubs of X&Y to history’s disgrace.

But even I don’t go as far as Junior, who insists it’s “brilliant”. It also “sounds like bagpipes”. When Stuart Adamson was wringing those kinds of sonics out of his guitar, we were pretty impressed. In an aghast sort of way.

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Back to December, I now believe it is brilliant and Junior says, “I’ve heard it too many times”.

Real talk.