22 men kick a ball around and then Germany win.) We talk about what to play and then Mrs. F puts on whatever she fancies.

We tend to go for podcasts on long journeys to avoid such rows...

Golly.

You might want to read 'A Couple of Hamburgers' by James Thurber.

Whatever I feckin' feel like!

The Neffilim (not Fields of the Nephilim, although they are related) at the mo.

The GLW and I have massively divergent tastes in music and so do all 3 kids meaning a 450 mile trip we have lined up is to be regarded with horror. I like pretty much the standard stuff for a Word reader but my better half likes Paul Potts, Meatloaf and Beverly Craven among other horrors.
I generally let her have the controls and pray for her to nod off so I can put Radio 4 on quietly. Probably doesn't help your problem but there's always some one worse off.
Good luck

Choose

Although it's permissible for pssenger to use an iPod.

Has also been the cause of a number of rows between Mrs dai and myself. The easy answer is let her choose. I used to say the driver should choose, and now she does pretty much all the driving.

Otherwise agree on a radio station and try to stick to it.

Radio.

Each of you load 100 tracks onto a neutral ipod and put it on shuffle. Hey presto! Everybody's equally dissatisfied.

(The bill's in the post)

you should both be listening to Synchronicity by the Police. It works on so many levels.

We driving is split fairly equitably, so the passenger changes the CDs while the driver chooses. We have fairly disparate tastes, but a pretty large overlap.

But there's agreement that I won't play Julian Cope and she won't play Eagles.

My Wife and two and a half year old daughter are currently into playing and singing 'Hands up, baby, hands up, give me your love, give me give me your love, give me give me' over and over again while we're in the car. The consequence is I can't get the bastard song out of my head - it keeps repeating on me like indigestion .... It's driving me NUTS

is the biggest issue in the car. I like to crank it up but am usually forced to accept a mere whisper by the self-styled Environmental Health Officer sitting next to me.

I have had more than the odd tussle over who gets to twiddle the knob but it usually ends in defeat and pursed lips :-{)

It's great! You let the DJ choose and then there are no arguments (except about which station to tune into).

I recall with great fondness this time of year when we would be on some seemingly epic journey (probably only a few hours to the North Yorkshire coast or over to North Wales) with Radio 1 on. We'd be gripped by DLT doing Snooker on the radio (quack quack oops) and throughout the day would be an ideal mix of the 80s sunshiney chart fodder of the day, plus Steve Wright or Peeder Powells bizarre choice of 70s Yacht Rock, a bit of Steely Dan and some 60s oldies which..say what you like about the old dinosaurs of 275 & 285...was perfect holiday listening in an Austin Allegro.

We can make the speakers work in the back of the car only, so the kids get their choices and we can chat or sleep at the front while they listen to whatever-it-is.

Recently it's been a brilliant CD with Badjelly the Witch and a few other Spike Milligan songs and poems. This CD includes an item where Spike sings in the style of an impossibly frail old man, in the throes of a rupture. I love it, but my 5-year-old finds it scary.

Whatever The lovely Carol tells me I am allowed to play.

When my kids were younger something like Harry Potter made a long journey fly by. These days they all have their own entertainment, but Mssrs Kermode and Mayo's Wittertainment always gets alisten and a debate. Other than that our friend Steven C's Third Way above seems reasonable

... unless I'm in the passenger seat!

& I share pretty much the same taste. Our first conversation at a party 25 years ago was about music so we have it in common, can't imagine it any other way. The car is a place where the volume is cranked up & the ipod does the choosin'. Of course any prog or Steely Dan gets skipped.

...at the number of you that actually have any say in all this!

We listen to what Mrs W says we should listen to.

Usually nothing, or George Michael.

VERY occasionally she'll say - 'Do you want to listen to some of your music?' followed within, at most, ninety seconds by, 'Can we turn this off now?'

It works for us.

...the most chilling sentence in the English language.

If we're in her car she chooses. I never say a word about the music, the car, the air-con, the radio reception or her driving (which is always better than mine, natch). In my car I will usually have taken time to construct a mutually acceptable playlist interspersed with a few new things that I think she might like. I have done this kind of thing since I used to send her cassettes when we were first going out. Until then she had never heard of James Taylor, Paul Brady, Bruce Springsteen etc, people who are now her favourite singers. But there will always be one track that kicks her off. "Who's this?" "Nick Drake, English singer-songwriter. Died young and penniless." I volunteer, helpfully. "Oh god, another slit your wrist merchant." comes the reply. And I get the raving hump. Then it'll be the car, the radio reception, I'm driving too fast, the sat-nav...everything. I spend 3 hours a day in my car. I do 900 miles a week in my car just getting to work. I love my car.

Thanks. Same time next week? I'll pay on the way out.

has every thing on it (everything we own, that is, not everything ever recorded) so our solution is to use my iPod and have it on shuffle. Skipping is not allowed so it's up to fate (or Apple's algorithmic randomness) what we listen to. We may not necessarily have chosen what comes up but most tracks are only a few minutes long so pretty much anything can be tolerated.

Choosing the music isn't an issue, although if we travel during the week I am forced to listen to Jeremy Kyle. The other week the subject was how much water to drink each day. "And on air next a man who hasn't drank water for 30 years !!, that's right not a drop has passed his lips for 30 years. So what do you drink then?". " I drink nothing but tea during the day and I have a couple of bottles of beer each night".

Anyway, I digress. On long journeys the main problem is that when MrsD is driving I have to maintain a steady flow of interesting conversation to keep her alert but when I'm driving she buys a magazine which she reads until she falls asleep.

Let her pick on the next long trip. It would certainly be better than a heated debate.*

* not if she picks Witney Houston though.

She reads.

that says 'every time you put Heart FM on, a kitten dies'

In the car, it's usually children choose - which means the Magic of Disney (by far my most listened to album of all time I think). If the children are asleep, it's driver chooses.

I own the car.
I have the driving licence.
I mostly choose.

We do like a lot of the same stuff though, so I try and choose things we're both happy with and I do let the FPO choose quite often. There's no point putting something on one of us doesn't like. We often play whoever we're going to see in the near future, as we usually have tickets for a few things coming up.

Thanks for all the advice and suggestions; what a downtrodden bunch we men are.

In the short term I'll ask her if she'd like to choose the music, in the longer term I'll ask her if she'd like to choose the music. After 10 years I might suggest the mutual 200 track playlist idea.

...so there isn't too much friction. There are a few banned albums that would only cause bad feeling - I can't stand Jack Johnson, so he's out; She doesn't like the Manics so they're gone too - but in the main we tolerate each other's tastes.

The only time it falls apart is if my wife puts on one of her albums while I'm driving then falls asleep. Me, on a motorway, with Will Young blaring out and no one else to distract me isn't a recipe for safe travel.

Who ever is not driving operates the iPod.

They then DJ track by track on an A-Z theme. A track from an artist / album beginning with A, then B etc. or even just song titles. They have the duration of the current track to find the one to play the next.

This works well until the little one gets ansy, we turn the iPod off and my wife sings "the wheels on the bus".

Tomorrows job is to make a 2-3 hour playlist of everyones faves to cover the journey to the seaside at the weekend as we all share an Ipod. Mrs C isn't too hard to please as long as my choices are ones that have charted plus to be fair she has a reasonable taste in music. Its the kids who are hardest to please. Since Number 1 started dance lessons she listens to some reasonable chart music (although i never thought I would ever download Ice ice baby) and you have to spend a few weeks gently educating her - cant be many 5 year olds requesting Prodigy's voodoo people or Song2. eventually some of her choices become ones you might choose. Its when she want's story CD's on I cringe. The Little Princess is the second most dislikable character in the world (After Spot the bloody dog) or when Number 2 (toddler!!) starts ranting for teddy bear songs that the problem starts. I know how to use the fader controls on the stereo so all the sound goes on in the back. Its the one time Mrs c and me get an uninterrupted chat during the day.

Me and Honest Man have a lot of things that we both like so it's never too much of a problem, we both choose a few CDs, but each with a mind to what the other really hates so there are no Manics from him and no Steely Dan from me.

That said he is very tolerant and generous-spirited and does let me listen to Club Classics on Heart if it's a friday night - and he never complains as I sing along to hours of disco cheese!

Mind you I like Sigur Ros and RT more than he does and I hate stuff like Robbie Williams or G4. Musically, I am a pretty good wife!

We also like roaming the radio dial and finding local radio stations of varying quality and interest, and if we're driving home late on a Sunday it's Keith Skues as soon as we're within range of the local radio groups in which he broadcasts.

And we also listen to spoken word - ISIHAC is a favourite, Round The Horne, stuff like that, and I hope to get the Complete Smile at some point as they were BRILLIANT.

A few times, when we've been on a car-based holiday, he's bought a stack of new music for both of us, and we've share the listening, and that's become our holiday soundtrack.

that causes the potential issues or not, rather than the music.

Mrs Specs_Beard (and I know I'm a lucky man) is not interested enough in 'playlists for the car' and that sort of enterprise to do it herself. So, even though she is the driver, her unspoken challenge to me is to put some CDs or whatever together for long journeys that won't spook her into driving onto the hard shoulder and weeping into the grass verge.

Sometimes I fail in this endeavour (hello, Radiohead - apparent scourge of wives everywhere), but she seems to appreciate the effort!

RT.

was a mandatory field in the selection criteria for both parties

There are some divergences but a broad an rich middle ground

Bizarre I know. 5 hours up and 5 hours down to Killy at the weekend. We talked.
I do put on 5 live for the sports scores as she knows I can't settle at 16:45 on Saturdays unless I do. And occassionally we try to catch the traffic news.
The exception is on the way to Latitude when we play bands who will be on over the weekend.

We've had a couple more days of driving around North Cornwall in musical silence, but it's been OK. As it's going to piss down again tomorrow, we're off to look around St Ives which is about an hour and a bit each way; I may offer to let her choose the music...

PS Yesterday we saw Nick Knowles wearing a wetsuit in Polzeath and today Mrs Jung saw Hugh Grant at the golf course we're staying near.

Wait till you meet the dude with 7 wives tomorrow! I wonder if he'd have the balls to play his own music?

I endured the whole of sugababes hits. The fall went on & she switched it on half way thru track 1. "its just a noise a he cant sing" i then told her that funnily enough i though the sugababes were crap. Now its silence in the car

We went for silence again today, except when I noticed the radio was tuned to PirateRadio... so I turned it up to see what they were playing. Tina Turner piped up and Mrs Jung quickly turned it off. This time I agreed with her.

When my kids were growing up it was all tapes, so the choice was limited to those in the box underneath the front seat - hence my two grew very familiar with a somewhat limited, but I like to think high quality, repertoire recorded from records in the mid/late 80s. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I was delighted when my 26 year old son recently confessed that he'd downloaded something which we had in the car at that time - it only took me two guesses to get to Pet Sounds! Pretty amazing considering the fairly unlistenable stuff he usually has on, but proves the power one has when the kids are helplessly strapped into the rear seats and you repeatedly fire the same music at them! I somehow think that you parents with iPods on shuffle are being much kinder, but it was a lovely moment for me....

BTW - Mrs NigelT is pretty tolerant, except when I decide to go through a whole artist's back catalogue in chronological order - I can sort of see her point on that one.....

Wossername has her own camel seven paces behind mine and keeps herself to herself while she does as she's told...

... my girlfriend and I, so we have a simple system. In her car, it's her choice. In mine, it's mine. That seems fair.