Dingles was a Folk Music label from Edgware. According to 'Music Week' of the 8th of December 1979 Roger Holt was the company's chairman and Helen Holt its secretary, while Royer Slater, David Foister and Alan Morrow were co-directors. Their label was named after the Holts' folk club. It issued its first record in 1976, a various artists album entitled 'Dingle's Regatta' (DIN-301), and it concentrated on LPs for the first three years of its existence. The unlikely success of the undeniably catchy 'Daytrip to Bangor' b/w 'The Flash Lad' by Fiddlers Dram (SID-211; 11/79) seems to have prompted Dingles to turn its attention to singles as well, and and over the course of the next eleven years at least twenty-four more of them were issued, in a numerical series starting at SID-221. Most disappeared without leaving much trace but one of them hit the Charts, Tony Capstick's 'The Sheffield Grinder', which was successful largely on the strength of its other 'A' side, the humorous 'Capstick Comes Home' (SID-227; 3/81). I don't usually list singles from the 1980s but I had to scrabble about a bit to put the Dingle's discography together, so I thought it was worth sharing. Numbers from SID-201 to 210 and from 212 to 220 appear not to have been used. As can be seen, 'Daytrip To Bangor' ran to several re-pressings: the yellow labelled records are the earliest, with the blue and then the white following on. The injection-moulded label shown above seems to be rare - that single was pressed in France for the UK market. Presumably, as an independent, Dingles got its records pressed weherever it could. Distribution in the 1979 and early '80s was by Spartan.
Copyright 2006 Robert Lyons.