TRUNK RECORDS TURNS 25! BOSS JONNY TALKS THE WICKER MAN, PATIENCE AND SONIC ERUPTIONS
“IT WAS first imagined as a way of making records that I needed to own which weren’t issued on vinyl,” says Jonny Trunk of the bespoke independent reissue label that bears his name. “But 25 years? I never intended that!”
The Super Sounds Of Bosworth, a trailblazing selection of ’60s and ’70s library music, set out the stall in 1996. To most, it was their first exposure to advert cues – outside of watching adverts – and recast background sounds-with-an-agenda as a genre worthy of appreciation. Selections were strange, funky, eerie, nostalgic, comedic, naff, utilitarian, familiar yet unknown, and fascinating – just as Trunk itself would prove to be.
The son of an antiques dealer, the young Jonny had been a teenager in late ’70s Surrey, liked old films and music, and was not alone in never shaking off the grubby prurience and futurist aspirations of the era. Trunk’s next big release was the first ever issue of the OST for 1973 British horror classic The Wicker Man in 1998. “It took three years, a weekly process of going, ‘Who can I phone now?’” says Trunk. “It was detective work, which I love. You have to be really determined and patient to do this. I think quite a lot of people would’ve given up with The Wicker Man and said they couldn’t be arsed.”
The timing of was curious: the still-reverberating acid/pagan folk revival followed soon after. “All we did was light the touch paper,” says Trunk. “But it is everywhere now.” Other threads can also be traced back to Trunk’s releases, as library music, Radiophonic experiments and old kids’ TV sounds bled into Hauntology; a 2011 book of 1972-1977 Sainsbury’s packaging even seems to have filtered back into the design of Waitrose’s own-brand range. “Some things I do can have a seismic effect years later,” he says. “I see it, but hardly anybody knows, which is quite nice really.”
Lust for glory, it seems, is not the Trunk way. Only a one-man show could have orchestrated a quarter of a century of the most slept-on movie soundtracks, askew jazz, TV themes, home-made space operas, recordings of railway buffet car announcements and lashings of audio-smut, not to mention archival treasures from Basil Kirchin, Delia Derbyshire and now – the latest Trunk discovery – 84-year-old electroacoustic maverick Janet Beat. Or his long-running soundtracks radio show, ‘Pop Trumps’ card games and, lest we forget, 2007’s brisk Number 27 hit The Ladies’ Bras with voice artist Duncan Wisbey (“One day, someone will use that in a bra advert, or on Tik Tok,” says Jonny).
“I think, you know, things have to be done a certain way,” explains Trunk, who admits to owning Beatles and Rolling Stones records as well as deep esoterica. “I’ve not run out of things to do yet, and if it isn’t fun I don’t want to do it. It’s got to entertain me.”
One record he’s currently planning will present incidental music from Hanna-Barbera cartoons. “If I can get this, it will cause eruptions,” Jonny promises MOJO. “Sonic eruptions! Because everybody I know will wet themselves if they hear it. And that’s what it’s all about.”
25th anniversary collection Do What You Love is out on October 1 on Trunk Records.
“If it isn’t fun I don’t want to do it.” JONNY TRUNK