Down with Childhood by Paul Rekret

Author:Paul Rekret
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence
ISBN: 9781910924501
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

Encore

Several months after “Charly” was released, then unknown group Smart E put out the single “Sesame’s Treat”. It not only charted one spot higher, hitting number 2 on the UK singles chart, it amped up the schmaltz factor too.

It’s sparse as far as songs go, amounting mostly to an up-tempo breakbeat and the jaunty calypso theme to the children’s TV programme from which the song draws its name – albeit repurposed as an oafish reference to Ecstasy.

In hindsight the joke falls flat. But the song’s appeal, derived mainly from the barely altered Sesame Street melody and the chorus of children who accompany it, is undeniable. The impulse is equal to that of “Charly”: the pastoral spaces of childhood encroached upon by the inebriate and the vulgar. It didn’t stop here either.

As its long history of by-passed masterworks attests, pop might not always know a good thing when it sees it. But when pop does know it has that thing, it bleeds it dry. In this regard “Charly” and “Sesame’s Treat” set the stage for a series of crossover hits engaged in a rearguard attack upon the 1970s childhoods of early ravers. If not always grounded in children’s voices, songs, or sampled cartoons, then double-time helium vocal samples ushered the child centre-stage in UK dance music between 1991 and 1992 in what became known, in an echo of the late 1960s, as “toytown techno”.

Urban Hype’s “A Trip to Trumpton” moored the gentle plucking acoustic guitar and occasional narration from the 1970s children’s stop-motion animated programme from which the song gets its title to a fast and hard breakbeat and stabbing keyboards. On “Roobarb and Custard” the group Shaft sampled the theme to the titular 1970s British cartoon dog and cat, themselves named after a favourite school dessert. The group Horsepower filched from the same decade when they used the rising horn slurs and pounding timpani of the theme music to the TV production of Black Beauty as the basis for their single “Bolt”. Altern-8’s single “Activ-8” has a recurring sample of a small child imitating the voice of what sounds like a doped up speed dealer: “top one, nice one, get sorted!”

The sophomoric mood was worn as much as it was sung. Baby soothers were a commonplace accessory, used to relieve the jaws of gurning dancers, while glo-sticks amplified the visual effects induced by Ecstasy. E’s were (and continue to be) often named after candy brands, lollipops were widely consumed, bright coloured clothing and jewellery were common. A drug-induced playfulness, along with the sorts of accessories one might expect to find at a three year-old’s birthday party, pervaded.

The question of whether the eschewal of subtlety and self-aware naughtiness in toytown techno really did “kill rave” as a subculture or merely accompanied the demise that often follows pop success is of lesser relevance here. In fact, Mixmag publicly apologised to the Prodigy for its hasty and in hindsight rather churlish verdict a decade later.

In any case, “Charly” and “Trumpton” were among the last major hits from the British interpretation of late-80s Chicago House and Detroit Techno.

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