A outlet for popular Christian devotional music, Herald was the label of Livingston Records, of London NW1. Much of its output was restrained and sedate but it did occasionally offer songs of a more modern sort from evangelical 'Beat' groups. It was started by Bill Hamilton, who had previously been behind Pickering & Inglis's 'Redemption Records' label. It began issuing records in 1959 and just about made it into the '70s: the only '70s release that I have seen listed is the EP by the Rotherham Quintet shown above, which came out in 1970 and qualified Herald for a place on this site. Livingston Records went into liquidation in 1967, but the British arm of American company Word took Herald over and kept it going for a while longer; Livingston's 'LRL' logo disappeared but the label design remained otherwise unchanged (2). Herald was eventually replaced by the Word label (q.v.); still under Bill Hamilton at first, the new label turned to more contemporary forms of Christian music. It flourished, but - sadly for us - concentrated on albums and appears to have issued very few 7" records in the '70s, though more of them came out in the '80s. Herald EPs, of which there were nearly ninety, were numbered in the ELS-1000s and had black labels. Singles had red labels, and had numbers in a HSR-2500 series. They seem to have run to fewer than thirty issues.
Copyright 2013 Robert Lyons.