From 1968 to 1982, studio-based musicians in the employ of Pickwick Records in Britain mimicked everyone from The Sex Pistols to Roxy Music. Eight albums were issued every year for 12 years…
Browsing: Labels
Factory was founded in 1978 with an esoteric roster of artists which included A Certain Ratio, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, X-O-Dus, The Distractions, Durutti Column, Crawling Chaos, Section 25,…
Brothers Leonard and Phil Chess immigrated to America in 1928 from Poland. In 1947 they bought out Aristocrat Records in Chicago, which they renamed Chess. Their first record was a…
Memorably described by Pete Waterman as “a crepe soles and roll-ups operation” Stiff Records was set up by industry managers Jake Riviera and Dave Robinson in the eye of the Pub…
Founded in an old movie theatre in Memphis (originally as Satellite Records) by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, Stax had been carving out a reputation since its inception in 1961…
With an $800 loan from his family and a roster of unknown young Detroit singers, former record shop owner Berry Gordy Jnr (pictured below) started what he intended to be a…
Atlantic Records has introduced the world to some of the most influential musicians this planet has ever produced; Jazz icons such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, and…
Kids today want designer names, the genuine thing. But in the 1950’s and 1960’s when money was in short supply, they were happy to buy double-sided cover versions of chart…
In the late 1980s the pop charts were awash with songs written and produced by Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman. They worked with everyone – Bananarama, Kylie Minogue,…
A music-obsessed Cambridge graduate, Geoff Travis hitch-hiked across America in his mid-twenties, where he picked up “literally hundreds of records by the time I got to San Francisco,” then shipped them…
The independent 2 Tone Records label was founded by Jerry Dammers of The Specials in 1979. Dedicated to dance-floor music performed by racially mixed bands, the label released The Special’s…
