The Comedy of Errors: Urban Hype - A Trip to Trumpton (13 June 1992)

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It’s curious isn’t it?  When you’re a child, you long to do many of the things that adults can do and to be a grown up.  Yet as adulthood approaches, the urge to look back and remember childhood starts to make itself felt.  Forgive the generalisation, I’ve met a number of people whose cultural antennae are tuned exclusively to the here and now, they’ve no interest in looking back, but in the 90s, it felt that they were the exception rather than the rule.  At some point from the autumn of 1992 onwards, certainly once I left school and went to college, it felt like I was discussing old television programmes from the late 70s/early 80s in the pub with friends,  every other week.  In a way, such conversations all fed into a nostalgia zeitgeist that grew to enormous proportions during the course of the 1990s and which the Internet was the perfect home for as the Millennium approached.

That’s not to say that cultural nostalgia was exclusively a 90s concept.  Revivalist music scenes were a part of previous decades such as the Rock ‘n’Roll revival of the early 1970s or the Mod revival of the late 70s, which saw Peel’s playlists stuffed with bands for whom The Who’s I’m the Face was a sacred text. The 80s saw the rise of club nights dedicated to nostalgic playlists where the music choices didn’t date past 1968 or 1973 depending on where you went.  The 90s went further though, the use of sampling from the mid 80s up to the early 90s providing a long lead-in to a period where DJs were eventually able to build up the courage that they didn’t necessarily need to prove their hip credentials by building tracks around samples of Charlie Mingus Jr. or horn riffs from obscure Stax Records b-sides.  Instead, they ingratiated themselves with listeners not by concentrating solely on record collections but by incorporating other musical cues from more recognisable sources such as children’s television programme theme tunes.  In this way, artist and listener were bonded by a shared experience, which maybe would not have been achievable had the DJs been constantly dipping into the far reaches of their record box and putting in samples requiring a verbal disclaimer at the start of the tune, “You, dear listener, won’t have heard of the source that I’m building this tune around, but trust me, you’re going to love it..and if you don’t, well that’s your philistinism coming through isn’t it?”
This sense of cultural bonding was far more possible back then, given that artists and audience had grown up during an age of three channel hegemony, and if the acid house explosion of the late 80s really was the new psychedelia from a drug ‘n’ vibes perspective, then it was natural that the music would eventually look at things from the child’s eye view.  The difference being that whereas the likes of Syd Barrett had to climb into the depths of their subconscious in order to create child-eye
centred music, artists of the 90s had only to access their memories of sitting in front of the television
from 10-15 years previous.  And it all kicked off through Toytown techno.

Over a period of around 2 years, four records hit the UK single charts which owed considerable debts to children’s television themes/concepts by building them into their musical structure.  First, and best
given the fabulously loose and funky grooves that made up the majority of it was Summers Magic by Mark Summers which opened by going even further back into nostalgia by sampling 40s radio comedy, It’s That Man Again, but pulled most of its audience in by building itself around the theme tune of The Magic Roundabout (see also Magic Style by The Badman).  As is the way, pioneers break new ground and others profit.  Summers Magic crept in the Top 30, but deserved to go higher.

By August 1991, The Prodigy used similar childhood memories to announce their arrival to world.  In their case, it was through the animated Public Information Films series, Charley Says. Synthesisers on early Prodigy tracks always sounded like they were being turned inside out to reveal their secrets and in Charly, it sounded as though Liam Howlett really did have a cat secreted inside his Korg and Roland. It delivered a Top 3 hit single.  How ironic that the creators of Firestarter made their first bow by celebrating a character who emphasised the importance of not abusing matches.

On June 29 1992 though, the stage was set for a Toytown techno duel. Two records were released on that day which used children’s TV show theme tunes as their principal melodic hook.  In the red corner, Sesame’s Treet by Smart E’s and in the blue corner, our present selection, A Trip to Trumpton by Urban Hype.  From the available information on the John Peel wiki, Peel doesn’t appear to have played the Smart E’s record. I can’t be certain about that given that the tracklistings for his June 1992 programmes are not fully complete. If this was the case, then more power to him as I really don’t like it either, but this is probably because even as a child I found the Sesame Street theme tune a terribly
anodyne piece of music introducing a frankly disturbing programme with its overtones of addiction and simmering domestic violence.  How could it hope to compete with the beautiful, ornate intricacy of Freddie Phillips’s classical guitar work for Trumpton?  Although the initial switch from drum ‘n’ bass to Phillips’s score for the Trumpton fire brigade may seem a little jarring, it all blends perfectly from the moment that Brian Cant says “Suddenly” at which point the fire bell brings the clubbers to the floor and amid all the Italian piano samples and beats, the refrain of “Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb” alongside sundry other interjections from a Trumpton episode sounds like DJ-hyping at its finest. I think Summers Magic is the best of the Toytown techno records, but A Trip to Trumpton is the one which most makes me want to get up and dance.  Peel played the record several times over the course of the month and after playing it on this show, he wondered whether he should have followed it up by playing The Trumpton Riots by Half Man Half Biscuit but he sourly passed up the chance.  “I don’t go in for that kind of cheap, crowd pleasing stuff...”

In the final analysis, the British public sided with Big Bird and Co. rather than the residents of Trumpton.  Sesame’s Treet peaked at Number 2 on the UK singles chart, with a Trip to Trumpton stalling four places lower.
The Trumptonshire Universe would experience a second coming on Radio 1 later in the decade when Kevin Greening used the song, Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling from Trumpton as a theme tune for his Mr. Whippy quiz in which listeners had to identify chart hits being played on ice cream van chimes.  I loved that piece of music so much and was delighted to discover that my girlfriend at the time had the original album.  One of the nicest Sunday afternoons, I can remember was spent sitting with her in the lounge and listening to that album.  Freddie Philips And Trumpton was made for Sunday afternoons, but Urban Hype showed it could also be made for Saturday nights.

Video courtesy of Choose the OldSchool Direction