A brother and sister, now aged 11 and 13, used a long and boring car journey to create a hit song that has gone viral on YouTube racking up more than a million views so far.
Siblings Jago and Dorothy were eight and 10 respectively when, stuck in traffic on the M5 travelling home to Oxford from a family holiday with their dad James Jackson and their mum Jenny in Cornwall, they came up with The Chicken Song, a fun pop track about how much chickens wish they could fly and all of the various methods they might try to do so, only to fall short.
Hearing the hilarious lyrics his kids had come up with, James, 48, thought it’d be a fun idea to record the song on some hobby recording equipment he had at home and upload it to YouTube for the world to enjoy.
Along with a charming animated video inspired by Jago and Dorothy’s ideas, The Chicken Song, which was uploaded under band name The Skwaks on February 7, 2025, went viral, amassing upwards of 1.1 million views as of late July.
“There was really heavy traffic on the M5, so what looked like a five hour journey was turning to, like, seven or eight hours…” James told PA Real Life.
“We’d tried everything to kill the boredom. And then we started singing some songs, and these two came up with the hook for The Chicken Song.
“We just kept working on it. We had quite a bit of time in the car, so I think by the time we arrived back, we’d basically got all the words and the melody, and it was all sort of worked out.
“Then a bit of time went past, and we thought, actually, it’d be quite fun to try and record it and do something with it.”
“We came up with a base line – ‘chickens wish they could fly, but they just die’ – and we just found it quite funny. Had a laugh about it. Then we kept on making up new words, new things, and we sort of put them together in a rhythm,” says 11-year-old Jago of the creative process.
“I added in some beat boxing... and then, yeah, it just sort of worked out as a song, I guess… We did add some things in, but we made the main song in that car journey.”
After getting home and being unable to get The Chicken Song out of their heads, the trio decided to lay it down using some hobby recording equipment James owned.
The dad said he hardly gets a chance to use his recording kit, but the passion he had for making music in his youth had never left him, so he enjoyed being able to ‘dust off’ the kit and play around with his children.
Dorothy and Jago loved the process of recording their track too, playing around with beatboxing, synth lines and more that came to mind.
“It was really fun recording it, knowing that it could actually go somewhere,” said 13-year-old Dorothy.
“We sort of came up with it thinking: ‘Oh, this is just fun, like, it’ll stay in the family’, but then we decided to make it bigger than that so other families could enjoy it.”
Other families have certainly enjoyed The Chicken Song. With more than 1.1m views on YouTube, the song has gone viral and earned The Skwaks nearly 500 subscribers despite only having one track currently on the platform.
“It was quite fun when it first went online,” James recalled. “Then we came down in the morning, and overnight there’d been tens of thousands more hits. That was really fun to see.”
On reflection, the family realised that not only did they have a viral-worthy comedy song to share with the world, but also an inspiring example of how kids can channel their creative energy into something to share with millions of people.
“I think that’s great for families, parents to know. That instead of their kids being on screens, they could help them make up a song, and it could get one million hits,” James said.
Plus, who knows, the creative play could even lead to something greater. Jago might be 11 years old, but he’s already thinking about what the future holds for him, with the experience of making The Chicken Song opening his eyes to the potential for a career in music.
“It’s given me an opportunity knowing that I can actually make a song that many people know, and I think it’s very exciting that I have another option for my career,” he said.
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