At 4.15pm on Monday 24 January, 1983, a strange programme appeared in ITV’s post-school schedule. A five-minute stop-motion adaptation of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, The Moomins would gently warp the nation’s youth’s impressionable brains over the next three years. For this wasn’t the papercraft wistfulness of Ivor The Engine, or Morph’s Plasticine surrealism, but a troubling 1977 Polish adaptation of Jannson’s deep-thought hippo-sprite monographs, crunched into mini-reveries of Fuzzy-Felt melancholia by future Pob and Tellytubbies creator Anne Wood.
Central to its strange pull, however, was the mesmerising music illuminating the adventures of Moomintroll and gang, a tottering agglomeration of flutey homespun folk, grunting monster choirs, warped Satie piano and hissy proto-techno, orchestrated by two Leeds-based post-punkers, Steve Shill and Graeme Miller.
“We were taking magic mushrooms and writing ambient psychedelia for the Impact Theatre Co-Operative,” remembers Miller. “Anne maybe saw one show [of ours] called The Undersea World Of Eric Satie, where Steve played a French waiter slowly drowning in a glass tank. We never asked: ‘Why us?’ You just accepted it.”
Presented with a brief to write 30 minutes of music, including “a theme tune, a sad theme, and a travelling theme”, Shill and Miller transported their malfunctioning DIY kit to London and set out to make everything sound “deliberately antique, like something’s already passed: pan pipes and ocarinas with wobbly synths, this wonky montage of northern melancholy”.
The duo never received further soundtrack commissions: Miller went into acting, Shill into film-making. But their one and only effort is finally being released. Sourced from a tape Miller found on his bookshelf, these ghostly transmissions from Moominvalley now sound oddly revolutionary – ethereal blueprints for Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin’s own downtempo electronic evocations of vanished childhood, perhaps.
Now an LA-based director, who’s helmed episodes of The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire, Shill holds The Moomins to be “as valuable as anything in my career”. Miller, currently an installation artist and composer, agrees: “At the time, I’d prowl the streets at 4.15 of an afternoon, listening to the theme tune come out of people’s windows. A children’s TV tune is a gateway into a lost world. It’s great to be able to bring it back.”
The Moomins by Graeme Miller & Steve Shill is out now on Finders Keepers. Adventures In Moominland is at the Royal Festival Hall, SE1, to Sunday 23 April
