When I started putting this site together I decided not to include labels which were designed by major companies for records by specific artists; so for example the label which EMI used for late-70s Queen records hasn't got a page to itself, and neither have the ones which United Artists used for The Stranglers, 999 or the Buzzcocks. Granted, Marc Bolan's 'T. Rex' label made it on to the site, but it had its own company sleeve and numbering series, which gave it a degree of individuality. Initially I only gave X-Ray Spex a page because I hadn't anything else to file under 'X' at the time; further research, however, suggests that it was sufficiently separate from its parent label to justify its being listed separately. An article on the Punk77 site says "Eventually the X-Ray Spex label was formed as a subsidiary of EMI. [Phil] Presky [of EMI] became the label manager, with the band getting a £10k advance, 15% royalties and £20k advertising for Spex singles." Those X-Ray Spex singles all had catalogue numbers taken from EMI International's INT-500 series. The first of them, 'The Day The World Turned Dayglo' b/w 'Iama Poseur' (INT-553; 4/78) had a green label without an EMI International logo on it; only the INT-500 number shows its parentage (1). The others had blue labels and the logo (2). Needless to say, the X-Ray Spex label lasted only as long as the band's association with EMI did - that is to say, around twelve months.
Copyright 2006 Robert Lyons.