Actually, in 2007, Trunk Records was really 12 years old, not ten. It's just that it was in 1997 that
Jonathan Benton-Hughes, aka
Jonny Trunk, bought out his former partners and relaunched Trunk Records as a label that mirrored his own idiosyncratic interests. As one can tell from the 21 tracks included on
Now We Are Ten -- a look back at the preceding decade's worth of releases -- those interests include tuneful downtempo electronica, reissues of obscure works by little-known soundtrack composers, the rediscovery of ephemeral musical genres like TV and radio commercial soundtracks, or music from children's records and TV shows, and rather a lot of pornography. He came by the last through a family connection:
Trunk's sister Emma, under the name Eve Vorley, was a popular softcore porn model in the '90s, and had hired
Trunk to run her fan club while the label was struggling off the ground.
Dirty Fan Male, a 2002 collection of Vorley's fan letters read by actor Duncan Wisbey in a variety of oddball voices over
Trunk's own musical settings, was Trunk Records' breakthrough release, eventually leading to both a book and a successful show at Edinburgh's Fringe Festival for alternative comedy performances. That show inadvertently led to one of
Now We Are Ten's six exclusive tracks, which itself went on to some U.K. notoriety. A brief nonsense song that Wisbey and
Trunk used to sing on the way to and from the theater, "The Ladies Bras" (set to the tune of "The Gonk" by
Herbert Chappell, a bit of German library music that had made it onto the soundtrack of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, one of
Trunk's first archival releases; American animation fans also know it as the tune of the closing theme of Cartoon Network's stop-motion series Robot Chicken) caught the ear of a few prominent U.K. DJs, including BBC Radio 1's drive-time host Scott Mills. Playing the 36-second song on the air incessantly, the DJs managed to get the song's download into the official U.K. Top Pop 75 Singles chart as a download-only release; it eventually peaked at number 27 in September 2007, making it the shortest song ever to chart.