Shaft was an English electronic music group, scoring a top 10 hit on the UK Singles Chart in December 1991 with "Roobarb & Custard". It featured recreated

vocal The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...

samples from the vintage children's television cartoon ''

Roobarb ''Roobarb'' (also known as ''Roobarb and Custard'') is an animated children's television series, created by Grange Calveley and originally shown on BBC1 just before the evening news. Each cartoon of the original series, written by Calveley and d ...

'', as well as a variety of sound effects. The main contributors were the British

record producer A record producer or music producer is a music creating project's overall supervisor whose responsibilities can involve a range of creative and technical leadership roles. Typically the job involves hands-on oversight of recording sessions; ensu ...

s Mark Pritchard and Adrian Hughes. Although the single reached the top 10 in 1991, it climbed to its highest position of No. 7 in January 1992. The follow-up track was "Monkey", which peaked at No. 61 in July 1992. The use of samples from children's television programmes was not unique to this hit within the genre, with Mark Summers having sampled ''

The Magic Roundabout ''The Magic Roundabout'' is an English-language children's programme that ran on BBC Television from 1965 to 1977. It used the footage of the French stop motion animation show '' Le Manège enchanté'' but with completely different scripts a ...

'' in his early 1991 hit " Summers Magic". However, Shaft was the first dance act to reach the top 10 with a track using this type of formula. Other groups who went on later in 1992 to repeat this success were Urban Hype, who reached No. 7 with " A Trip to Trumpton", and Smart E's, who achieved a No. 2 hit with " Sesame's Treet". The string of similarly created records were dubbed toytown techno.

References

English electronic music groups English dance music groups {{electronic-band-stub