Sam And The Womp

Trumpeter Sam Ritchie was central to the project, with original vocalist Bloom de Wilde giving the early recordings another immediately recognisable presence. The music mixed a taste for Balkan brass with programmed beats and an appetite for exuberant performance. The ingredients retained their individual shapes, so the attraction was partly in the collision rather than in a perfectly blended surface.

Bom Bom became a British number one. Its arrangement makes a virtue of short, memorable gestures: a brass figure, a vocal sound, a rhythmic turn that arrives just when the listener expects it to. The record does not need an elaborate narrative to establish a character. It creates a small, brightly coloured scene and keeps finding ways to make it move.

Ravo followed in 2013, continuing the meeting of playful vocal delivery, brass colour and dance production. Zeppelin appeared in 2015, with later releases including East Meets West and collaborations that drew the project further toward reggae and sound-system culture. The catalogue developed through singles and performance rather than through one defining sequence of traditional studio albums.

That format suits a group whose identity is so closely tied to physical response. The trumpet can function as a lead voice, a rhythmic punctuation mark or a sudden change of scenery inside the beat. Sam and the Womp's best-known record is deliberately immediate, but the broader musical idea is more flexible: let live instrumental personality interrupt the electronic grid, then make the interruption the reason to dance.