[6] The Stone Roses, ‘Love Spreads’

We tried a new experiment this morning – well, we were pushed for time and it would’ve been a pity to mess up this tune-a-weekday thing we’ve got going on – and listened to the song on the bus to nursery, like teenage rapscallions playing tinny bassline house on the backseat. Don’t worry; we were at the front, listening through sound-isolating earphones at a responsible volume. Junior showed fierce concentration all the way through the lengthy John Squire Led Zep-a-thon, breaking off only to declare that her arms ached from holding the earpieces in place. Afterwards she said that she liked the song and it had “lots of guitars”.

I think Squire would have been pleased with the assessment. That’s why he kept the band holed up in Wales for four years, wasn’t it? To lay down “lots of guitars”.

Anticipation had reached Chinese Democracy levels by the time this surfaced in November 1994, and it was only ever going to be an anticlimax. It’s a pretty solid rocker with a bit of swagger, but last time we’d seen The Stone Roses they looked as if they might Change The World with large jeans and half-inched James Brown beats. This plodded in comparison. Still, with a sense of relief at any kind of output, I loved it for a few months, and Paddy and I particularly enjoyed making Neil and Kate sing “The Messiah is my sister” over and over in the backseat as we drove up to Edinburgh that New Year’s Eve.

[7] Beastie Boys, ‘Get It Together’/‘Sabotage’

What do you mean, “White men can’t rap”? Isn’t rapping just shouting a lot and over-emphasising the final word in each line? No? Oh.

To allow a bit of slack, the Beasties were well into playing their own instruments in a jazz-funk stylee by this stage, and banging on about Buddha – they’d transcended that frat-boy yelling thing. Well, a bit, anyway. Whatever, you have to hand it to this AA-sider. First up, a suffocating, paranoid skip-hop with a sterling turn from The Greatest Laidback Rap Voice In Hip-Hop, A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, and categorically not the last mention of “macaroni” in this Top 10. Junior gave the track the full shoulders and elbows in exaggerated fashion and even sang along to the fearful “get it togetha”s.

Second on the bill, the screaming punk-rap of ‘Sabotage’. It’s a great video, at least. For this, Junior did the teeth-baring rawk face. It’s something of an ordeal to actually listen to, but come on, at worst you know you’re alive.

[8] Kylie Minogue, ‘Confide In Me’

So Kylie fled the suffocating grip of Stock Aitken Waterman to find credibility, dance chops and, ultimately, zero record sales with then ultra-cool label Deconstruction. Everything looked rosy with ‘Confide In Me’ – all melodrama, crunchy beats and Top 3 success – and a decent album followed, only with diminishing returns. I worked at Deconstruction for one whole day as the album was being released, and made off with tons of promo material including a semi-lifesize (well, you can never tell with the Kylester) cardboard cut-out that my brother now owns. It was small recompense for spending eight hours sending out M People 12”s.

My own diminutive pop star claimed to “like Kylie” and admired the glossy CD booklet. At first she had it confused with the Saint Etienne CD also on the desk, which is quite the coincidence – ‘Confide In Me’’s B-side was a cover of the Ets’ ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’. Even more thrilling, the, er, other B-side was a cover of Prefab Sprout’s ‘If You Don’t Love Me’. Truly a potted history of pristine pop.

[9] Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories, ‘Stay (I Missed You)’

I suppose I could do some actual idle research, but for the sake of argument let’s say that Lisa Loeb disappeared off the face of the planet. She made a nice single though; a meandering little delight with no proper chorus. It was the theme to slacker flick Reality Bites – again, I could get off my behind and find out, but I believe it starred Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder, and was about a bunch of bohemianly beautiful Generation X-ers doing sweet Fanny Adams for an hour or two. I couldn’t get with the slacker thing. Plaid’s too drab.

Junior sat quietly on my lap. She gets “missed” mixed up with “lost” and had a hairy can’t-see-mum moment while disappearing down aisles in M&S this week, so perhaps this was a time for panicky contemplation.

[10] Whigfield, ‘Saturday Night’

Now THIS was a hit. Junior danced like a dervish from the funny quacks at the start to the skipping outro. Of course, the funny quacks continued throughout, but Whigfield was never going to be Aretha Franklin, was she?

Sannie Carlson sprang from Denmark, yet  ‘Saturday Night’ is a purely Italian dance record, if perhaps lacking the pedigree of Italo House classics. Really lacking it. It’s a novelty, with its endless little dance and silly lyrics, but it was so catchy it made me momentarily forget my pint of 80/- when I first heard it in an Edinburgh bar. She’s apparently still making records, so it’s testament to one holiday song’s nagging appeal that we all remember this but don’t have the first clue what she’s lent her squawk to since.

[11] Goldie, ‘Inner City Life’

Apart from enjoying 4Hero’s messaround with ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’ in the early ‘90s and enduring a terrifying hungover experience in a Brixton café one Sunday morning in 1993, I was never at the sharp end of jungle – or indeed its refined descendant, drum ‘n’ bass. But I like a bit of Omni Trio and, er, Marcus Intalex, and, well, this. I’m sure I’m committing all sorts of genre offences (there’s rarely been a more heavily policed form of dance music), but that’s what we’ll call this – drum ‘n’ bass.

Or jazz, let’s face it. Goldie’s urban odyssey is pilled-up, snare-fuelled jazz. It’s also thrilling; not that you’d know this from Junior’s response. She stayed resolutely down the other end of the room, playing a grotesquely speeded-up preset ‘Jingle Bells’ on her shocking pink keyboard. Yeah, yeah, you could hardly tell which was Goldie.

[12] The Charlatans, ‘Can’t Get Out Of Bed’

The Charlatans are rather cuddly, aren’t they? Or is that just me? They make untaxing but rewarding records and thumb their noses at fashion. There were those initial dalliances with baggy, sure, but after that they settled into a decade and a half of filling songs with warm melodies and loose-limbed rocking. It’s all been faintly unremarkable, hasn’t it? Still, there was a mid-‘90s purple patch where everything Tim Burgess and the lads touched turned to Byrdsian gold, and ‘Can’t Get Out Of Bed’ kicked it off.

The verses are the best bit, slow riffs and hooks. A curious Junior asked for the song title, then took to lying on the floor, pretending she couldn’t “get out of bed”. That’s as far as her critical appraisal went.

[13] Oasis, ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’

For all his habitual recourse to magnetic poetry set gobbledigook, Noel did once have a knack for connecting with the nail. To start off a song called ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ with the line “Is it my imagination, or have we finally found something worth living for?” takes a special kind of understanding of a mindset most of us have found ourselves in at some point or other. That the whole concept is pulled off with massive T. Rex riff steals and a vocal of absolute dunderheaded belief from the mighty Liam only underlines its gauche brilliance.

Junior misheard the title: “Are they in a hole?” Well, yes, usually – ha ha ha. It nearly works. She pulled a few snarly faces to match the raucous rock’n’roll but mainly busied herself with choosing the next records to play. “Put on the pink one [an odd special edition cover for Wham!’s The Final] first, then Girls Aloud.” I left that to Mum.

[14] Warren G. & Nate Dogg, ‘Regulate’

Well, Junior’s reactions were many and varied: “Can I play my guitar, please?”; “Can I have Girls Aloud on, please?”; and, to me asking why she was laughing, “Because your dancing’s funny.”

It’s a difficult record to react to, anyway – so laidback, so smoooooth, so easy on the ear yet sneaking in a hard-edged undercurrent. “Hard-edged” hardly suffices, really, what with Nate Dogg wiping out all those muggers. But the groove is purest r’n’b, destined for the coffee table if it wasn’t so accomplished and the lyric so banal in its violence. That’s G-Funk. Still gangsta, but all sophisticated, like.

[15] The Beautiful South, ‘Prettiest Eyes’

Junior strolled around the room for the duration, looking solemn but trying to hide a smirk. Well, how apt! Paul Heaton delivered his kitchen sink dramas and trad love songs with a figurative wink almost every time. Almost every time.

‘Prettiest Eyes’ sounds sincere to me, a warts-and-all celebration of a love grown old yet never stale. “Sixty 25th of Decembers/Fifty-nine 4th of Julys” are writ in every laughter line, “and I only write them down just in case/You should die”. It’s a great glob of sentiment, but that glob isn’t gloopy and Heaton inhabits the older man as if he’s the future he longs for. It’s all set in a typically radio-friendly arrangement, the type of comfortable noise that passed everyone by until they idly nosed at the greatest hits set at the end of this year and made it one of the fastest selling albums in history. That was a bolt from the blue.