‘We were just clowning about’: how cartoon rave changed pop

Twenty-five years ago, the British charts exploded with cheap and cheerful songs such as Sesame’s Treet, Trip to Trumpton and Ebeneezer Goode, that turned a whole generation on to dance musicUnderage discos could be pretty strange in the early 1990s. You’d get a blast of Nirvana; maybe even REM for the more sophisticated pre-teen. But you were also guaranteed to hear at least one example of speaker-rattling, drug-referencing rave music that borrowed samples of children’s TV tunes for its hooks – samples that its pre-teen audience was too young to have nostalgia for.There was Smart E’s Sesame’s Treet, which reached No 2 in the UK and an improbable No 60 in the US in 1992. There was Trip to Trumpton by the respected breakbeat duo Urban Hype. In 1991, there was Mark Summers’ Summers Magic, which started the trend by sampling The Magic Roundabout theme tune. And then there was Charly by the Prodigy, a track that led Mixmag to accuse the band of killing rave. Continue reading…