1 week Ago By [email protected] (Lauren Davidson)
A young man has been left "over the moon" after managing to unearth an iconic song that thousands of visitors to Pleasure Island over the years will remember - after he thought it had been lost forever. Alfie Lugsden, 19, has dedicated the last five years of his life to running the popular Pleasure Island Archive page on Facebook, where he sells items of memorabilia from the theme park and shares nostalgic photographs and videos to ignite people's memories. But despite having a huge collection of Pleasure Island items - including many of the original blueprints of the rides from before the park opened in 1993 - there was one thing that Alfie believed to have been lost and long gone.
The original song that was played on the popular Tinkaboo Factory ride with the memorable and catchy 'in the Tinkaboo Factory' line is remembered by thousands, but all that remained of it was a brief, grainy 30-second-long clip - until now. Speaking to Grimsby Live about the discovery, Alfie said: "There's always been a little clip of [the song] that's about 30 seconds long, it wasn't the best and really low quality, and about a month ago, I was contacted by the music producer, Mick Armistead, who produced the original song in 1993 a couple of months before the park opened. Alfie thought the original song had been lost forever (Image: Pleasure Island Archive) "He said, 'I've still got the original tape and got all four tracks of it, and if you'd like me to digitise it for you I'd be more than happy to'.
About a month later he went to a recording studio down in London and had it digitised and had it send over, and now we've got the whole thing. "I was over the moon because I've been searching for it for over ten years, so to just have the guy come out and say, 'oh, I did that', was amazing. He'd never visited the park and didn't know where the song had ended up - he was just asked to make a song about a family who own a sweet factory and have a dog.
"He never knew it ended up at Pleasure Island. He just happened to notice the Tinkaboo name and realised he'd done the song for it." Before the Cleethorpes theme park closed for good in 2016, the song that played during the Tinkaboo Factory ride had been changed to the 'Whistle While You Work' tune, with the original having been played until around 2008.
"Some people remember it sounding like children's voices but it was because it was sped up a little bit," Alfie said. Keep up to date with all the latest breaking news and top stories from Grimsby with our free newsletter "On the ride they had it played on a really old tape so it was probably playing a little bit too fast, it was really worn out, but because this has been digitised it's how it originally sounded back in the day." Watch an old clip from 1999 of the Tinkaboo Factory ride and its original theme song below:.
