Nick Clegg - 'Waka Waka - Annoying'

In the five months since David Cameron and Nick Clegg went public with their relationship, we have discovered the men have more in common than just their ages, expensive educations and eerily smooth complexions. To the list we can now add: a love of Radiohead.

 

Appearing on Desert Island Discs yesterday, the deputy prime minister chose Street Spirit (Fade Out) by the Oxford quartet as one of his favourite records, four years after his coalition partner plumped for Fake Plastic Trees by the same band.

 

"I've got no great story attached to this," Clegg told Kirsty Young, "other than the fact that a lot of people from my generation – I'm now 43 – will have a Radiohead song on their list." Some of the group's fans will no doubt be aghast at the endorsement, but anyone who remembers the operatic manband G4 covering Creep in the 2004 edition of X Factor will have accepted that Radiohead entered mainstream consciousness some time ago.

 

Clegg revealed that the coalition went ahead only after he sent a text to a mutual friend to ask of Cameron – "Can I trust this guy?" he asked, and received a positive response. As for the cuts the two men have sponsored, Clegg said he had spent "every day of this process, pretty well every minute of this process asking myself whether there are pain-free alternatives, whether we are doing the right thing, and I genuinely believe there is no easy alternative".

 

Clegg, something of a cosmopolitan polyglot, picked tracks from all over the world. There was Petit Pays, Cesária Évora's beautiful paean to her native Cape Verde, and Chopin's Waltz in A Minor played by the Turkish pianist Idil Biret. Both pieces, he said, reminded him of his wife, Miriam González Durántes, an accomplish pianist herself. He steered clear of anything too obvious or trendy and, with the exception of David Bowie's Life On Mars, chose lesser-known tracks when picking famous artists.

 

And, like many political castaways, Clegg had something in the mix to show a different side to his character. Whereas Cameron went for Benny Hill's Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West), Clegg – apologising first to the listeners – went for Waka Waka, the theme to the 2010 World Cup by Shakira. Keen chart watchers will know that the Colombian singer is politically engaged: she once donated 10,000 pairs of tennis shoes to impoverished children in her hometown of Barranquilla, and has donated millions of dollars to charity.

 

But Clegg chose the track for personal, not political, reasons. "This is actually a track I really find quite annoying, but I would love to have it on my desert island because it particularly reminds me of my little one-and-a-half-year-old," he said. "He is obsessed. He wakes up in the morning and looks at you with an absolutely excited expression and says 'Waka Waka' and so I listen to this dozens of times every day."

Well, I'm glad his kid likes it! I guess it is quite a cheesy song, but it really does stick in your head!