HAPPY TIME
A label which dealt in records
for children. There had been a Happy Time children's label in America
in the late '50s and in the '60s, but there is no obvious link between that one
and this one. The American label was a division of the
Pickwick International Company, whereas the 1970s British version of Happy Time was
owned by Damont Records, of Hayes. Catalogue numbers suggest
that it issued at least a dozen EPs, though I have only managed to track down
a handful of them, which are listed below. Much of the material
on them was sourced from David Leonard Miller's 'Damil' company,
an American firm specializing in budget
records. The same material can apparently be found in various combinations on a
series of LPs on the 'Happy House' label, dating from around 1976;
those record again came through Damont. Catalogue numbers were
in the HT-0s, and the artists involved remained anonymous. The EPs,
which came in colured picture sleeves and were all issued in 1975, sold in shops
such as Woolworths for the princely sum of 19 pence. The label was
yellow with mid-blue printing; the blue colour hasn't scanned very well.
Pressing of the few examples that I have seen in the vinyl seems to have been by Pye -
the records have Pye-style matrix numbers in the run-off.
Copyright 2008 Robert
Lyons.