Ensign started out as a joint venture between Phonogram Records and Nigel Grainge, who had been a successful head of A&R for that company. According to Billboard (18th December 1976), Grainge had left Phonogram in order to set up Ensign, but his relationship with his previous employer would remain a close one: Ensign was to be funded by Phonogram and was to have a worldwide licensing agreement with that company. The article stated that Ensign would have a roster of six acts and that it was looking for hit singles and for albums with broad selling potential. Disc jockey Chris Hill was on board as co-producer and musical advisor, and Barry Manstoff, formerly with 20th Century, had also been recruited, which suggested to 'BB' that the new company would have black music / disco leanings, but there was no official A&R policy in that direction. The first product from the new label appeared some four months or so after that announcement, in the shape of a single by Australian group Flash & The Pan, 'Hey St. Peter' b/w 'Walking In The Rain' (ENY-1; 4/77); 'Music Week' of the 16th of April noted Ensign's arrival. The following week 'BB' of the 23rd of April added, almost as an aside, that Ensign had signed a group from Dublin, The Boomtown Rats.
Danny Williams gave Ensign its first hit with its third single, his 'Dancin' Easy' b/w 'No More Cane' (ENY-3; 7/77) just about nudging the Top 30, but it was with The Boomtown Rats that the company struck gold. The Rats provided a run of nine Chart successes before moving to Mercury in the early '80s, including consecutive No.1s in 'Rat Trap' b/w 'So Strange' (ENY-16; 10/78) and 'I Don't Like Mondays' b/w 'It's All The Rage' (ENY-30; 7/79) - the others all got into the Top 20 and three of them made it into the Top 6. Ensign was also an early proponent of 'Britfunk' with artists such as Light Of The Word; that band enjoyed a run of four hits for the label but they had relatively low placings. In addition Eddy Grant provided a couple of Reggae hits via a link-up with his Ice label (see 'Ice (Reggae)'). A feature on Ensign in 'BB' of the 3rd of October 1981 observed admiringly that over the first four years of its existence the label had scored with one single out of every two it had issued, and in the year or so from September 1980 till that point it had had twelve hits from fifteen releases. According to the article all of the hit artists apart from the Boomtown Rats had been black.
In the autumn of 1980 Ensign went independent, reportedly out of dissatisfaction with Phonogram's overseas performance. Then at the start of 1981 it joined up with RCA under a licensing agreement, which extended to America ('BB', 3rd October). By that time it had lost the Rats, but it was to continue to establish its reputation with successes by the likes of Sinead O'Connor and the Waterboys. Ensign linked up with Chrysalis in the autumn of 1985 ('BB', 4th October), and a year later was bought up by that company ('BB', 4th October 1986). Grainge and Hill stayed with Ensign until the summer of 1993, and later joined Arista ('BB', 15th January 1994).
Numbering of Ensign singles was in an ENY-0 series. As a result of the relationship with Phonogram and Phonodisc, labels in the 1970s were predominantly of the injection moulded type, though ENY-23 - a split single of reissued material by The Four Pennies and Carlo - had a paper label, as the result of a contract pressing by Pye (3); the pink colour was presumably an echo of the title of the LP from which the tracks were taken, 'Pink Grease'. The injection moulded labels came in shades of yellow-green (1) and light green at first (2); silver ones (4) appeared around the autumn of 1978, while red labels (5) seem to have been limited to a December 1978 reissue of ENY-4. Dark green (6) replaced silver in the summer of 1979, shortly before the logo underwent a change of design (7). Along with the new logo came a new company sleeve (9). Re-pressings meant that popular singles could be found with labels in two or more different colours and sometimes with two different logos. Thanks to JamesTrash of the 45Cat and 'worthlesstrash' sites for the first and fourth scans. The discography below only covers the '70s.
Copyright 2006 Robert Lyons.