Being dead isn’t what it used to be. Until recently, Britons were most likely to be carted off to the infernal/eternal via hymnal classics such as The Lord’s My Shepherd or Abide With Me. But a survey of 200 funeral directors reveals changing tastes, with pop and show tunes the big winners. Frank Sinatra has gained four places with My Way, it’s a new entry for Bette Midler’s Wind Beneath My Wings at four, while All Things Bright and Beautiful slips one to seven.

The survey organisers suggest the change is in part down to the waning role of religion in our lives. That may be true, but the likes of Midler and Eva Cassidy still feel an awkward halfway house between hymnal and secular. Here are a few choices that could reflect the lives and struggles of Britain’s population far more deeply.

(I Feel Like) Chicken Tonight, webuyanycar.com, Just One Cornetto, Bodyform For You, Do The Shake ’n’ Vac Put The Freshness Back

Photograph: Alamy

Reflect your love of slobbing around watching TV as life passed you by: use a playlist of classic ad jingles to accompany your journey towards the great test card in the sky. Friends can nod and weep as they remember where they were the first time you turned down an invite to the pub, a canalside walk in the summer sun or a potential double date because of an appointment with The Osbournes, Storage Wars, American Dad or Versailles.

Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music (Side Three)

As the casters trundle you into the grave, treat your friends to 15 minutes of Lou Reed’s unlistenable scree of electronic collage, and let them imagine you’re already communicating with hell’s own 56k modem. Confuse them into searching for hidden meanings in your otherwise dull as sin life by strictly specifying only the third side of this identically cochlea-lacerating noise-wash.

Taylor Swift – We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

Funerals are a place where, with careful planning, you might bind together the disparate strands of life into a cohesive whole, to at last fly free like the white doves you’ve specified should be released after Aunt Janice reads Psalm 106. Occasionally, though, that cohesiveness is best created by striking back at those who wronged your sexual vanity. And now that you are beyond either want or need, you hold all the cards. Being dead is the ultimate treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen tactic, so deploy it fully.

Mr Bungle – Platypus

You always maintained to anyone who would listen that Mike Patton’s best work was outside Faith No More. But no matter how many times you tried to put Disco Volante on in the small hazy hours of a party, everyone roundly ignored its avant-garde funk-metal genius. Well, they won’t be laughing now.

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown - Fire

Cremations only.

