Kids Countryside

Lace up your trainers and let’s go kids! It’s time to roll around in the grass. The sun is mild, the wheat is almost ready to be cut, we might even come across a fox, who knows? In this playlist we’re going to explore how the thousands of sensations ignited by the countryside, in the muddy grey of the rain and under the leafy apple trees, have been explored through music. There are so many feelings that many artists have tried to put into song at one time or another.

Fed up with his frenetic years with the Beatles, Paul McCartney made a whole record about the countryside – Ram – in which he proclaimed his return to the “Heart of the Country”. The four-piece Blur did the same thing 25 years later on “Country House”, a song mocking Londoners in jeans who came to seek exoticism in English coppices. On Melocoton, French singer Colette Magny embodied the simple but intensely fantasised feelings that draw city dwellers away from the city. Just listen to Chuck and Mary Perrin, who sang “Life Is a Stream” as if the rest of the world had disappeared behind a green hill.

However, the countryside is also something else. Living there all year round for someone who never had a choice, like Taulard, meant wandering around in the evening drinking beer on the bonnet of the car, being solitary by the river, attending garlic festivals, and wandering down dusty summer roads. The countryside can be a wide open space to dream of space ducks (Daniel Johnston), a place of hallucinatory white rabbits (Jefferson Airplane) or even wildebeest (Anne et Gilles). We don’t dream enough about wildebeest…