KINGSLEY LEISURE
A rather obscure label, from Devon. Kingsley
Leisure was a company which was responsible for a holiday village in
Westward Ho, Bideford. There was a club there to provide
entertainment for the holidaymakers, and it seems like a reasonable guess that the
company made records of some of the acts that appeared
there, presumably so that people could buy them as souvenirs. Catalogue
numbers suggest that there were at least four releases. One was a
Various Artists album, 'Cabaret At The Kingsley Leisure Club', which featured
Ken Arnold, Kellie, the ABC Hit Band, Fred Davis and Graham Brown; it had
a catalogue number of KLC-101, and came out in 1978.
KLC-102 is currently unaccounted-for, but KLC-103 was a 1980 EP by Des Ford, 'Memories',
containing the tracks 'The Way We Were', 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again',
'Sweet Caroline' and 'Words'; its matrix number, SJP-819, is one of a series
used by the Fair Deal Studios (see 'Clubland' and 'SJP'). There's
no date on the only Kingsley Leisure single that I've managed to
track down, 'Day-O' b/w 'Disco Paradise' by Ezeke and Aqua-Vita (KL-1001), but I'm quietly
confident that it was from the '70s. It seems probable that the first album and
the first single were made without a huge gap in
time between them; and in addition the Disco craze was on its way out by
1980, so 'Disco Paradise' seems likely to have been recorded before
that time. If I had to bet on a year I'd choose 1979,
but I wouldn't put a huge amount of money on it. The band must
have got some mileage out of 'Day-O' as they released another (?) version
on Drive Records (DRS-003) in 1982, calling it 'The
Banana Boat Song' and substituting 'Dublin' for the Disco song. There are
differences in the label design of the two Kingsley Leisure 7" records: the Des Ford
EP kept the 'Seagull in front of the sun' logo but the label
name changed in size and in font and shrank, the 'enclosure'
around the top half of the label disappeared, and the printing was in
black instead of dark blue. Thanks to Charlie Chalk of the 45cat
site for the use of his scan here.
Copyright 2016 Robert Lyons.