AMAZON

  

Amazon was the label of the Amazon Recording Studions, of Kirkby, Liverpool, which was the successor to Liverpool Sound Enterprises (q.v.).  It seems to have been a custom / private / vanity recording label, whatever you want to call it - one where the artists paid the company to make their records.  As is the way with such concerns, many of its 7" releases were EPs.  7" and 12" records appear to have generally shared the same 000 numbering, but they had different prefixes: AR7 for the former, AR12 for the latter.  AR7-008 / AR12-008 was an exception, but thus far it is the only one that I have stumbled upon.  Some Amazon products came out on other labels: see 'Cloth Cap' and 'Tao Productions'.  Pressing of the injection-moulded items, which came in several different colours, was by Phonodisc; AR7-002 was pressed by Deroy.  In 1978 Amazon seems to have mutated into 'Jungle Records' (q.v.).  It would appear that the numbering was continued, only with the prefix now as JR and with the 7 and the 12 attached to the start of the number instead of the end of the prefix.  A short-lived Amazon label from 1980, which used an AMZ-1000 numerical series, was a subsidiary of RK Records (q.v.), but it too had a connection with Amazon Studios: the first single on that label was by studio recording engineer Mike Bersin.  The Amazon and Jungle records that I have managed to sniff out are listed below, with the albums being in brackets; the studio doesn't appear to have lasted long into the 1980s.  Thanks to Rob Bowes for the scan of the Jerry Grant EP (3).

Copyright 2008 Robert Lyons.