What’s Songs for Children all about?

Me and Mike Mystery moved here from London about a year ago, and we just really miss the indie clubs, and hearing the music that you like when we went out at night. There seems to be a lot of live bands going on, and the scene seems to be getting better all the time, but there weren’t any clubs playing the music we liked so we thought, “Okay, we’ll do it ourselves and start our own one.” We just really wanted indie music that you could dance to.

Yeah, there’s really big clubs in London. You’re spoilt for choice really. You could go to a Swedish indie night, or you could go How Does It Feel to be Loved, which has a really strict policy, or heaps of others. Here, there just isn’t that type of scene.

We started off playing a lot of UK indie stuff. We also play post-punk and a few punk tracks. We’re playing lots of bands like These New Puritans, Dananananaykroyd, Art Brut, and some of the old favourites like Belle and Sebastian, Jesus and Mary Chain, and New Order. A lot of the new indie stuff is really influenced by the 1980s sound, whether it’s C86, post-punk, synth or electro. So we think the 80s stuff goes really well with the new UK indie stuff. We’re not so keen on playing a lot of 90s stuff – we don’t want too much Brit pop or grunge – and you can hear that stuff in the pubs in LKF anyway.

I’ve noticed on the flyers there’s a strict no Coldplay policy.

Yeah. No Coldplay. We really hate them. They are totally shit. [Laughs] I think they really celebrate mediocrity in music. That’s the stuff that we really don’t want to play – Coldplay, Stereophonics, Keane, and Kasabian. They’re all just a little bit cock-rock. Also, we don’t do metal. We’ve had a few requests for metal, people asking for AC/DC. And, even in an ironic way, we don’t want to do it.

Yeah, we try to. We also have a Facebook page, where we’ve been asking people to tell us what they hate and what they rate. We’re also going to have a blackboard where people can write requests on the board during the night.

I saw on the Facebook page that someone was asking for Spandau Ballet. Was that a yay or nay?

[Laughs] Um, nay.

We’re planning on doing Songs for Children monthly, and we’re also thinking about a few others, like an afternoon, alterative summer event, which should be fun. Really, we’ll just keep doing it as long as people want to come.

Mark Tjhung

DJ Jane Blondel plays Songs for Children at Philia on May 29