In the second half of the 1970s several record companies began to put out records by successful - and sometimes unsuccessful! - groups on customized labels: Queen, The Buzzcocks, The Stranglers and 999 were just four of the bands which were honoured in that way. Because the designs were kept for one particular group, I decided not to treat them as actual record labels for the purposes of this site. Some groups, however, owned their own labels - the Rolling Stones spring to mind - and these I have included. The Nazareth label would appear to have been one of the latter. 'My White Bicycle', by the band Nazareth, charted in 1975 on Mooncrest, as MOON-47. Mooncrest appears to have run into some sort of trouble at about the time the single was in the charts; I would guess that as a result of this later pressings had a new catalogue number, NAZ-10, and the label shown above. On the run-off, the old Mooncrest matrix number has had a line scratched through it, and the new 'NAZ 10 A 1' matrix number has been added. Subsequent records by the band were issued on Mountain (q.v.), so presumably the Nazareth label was merely a stop-gap, a way of ensuring that copies of the single were available at a time when there was a demand for them. Manufacture was by EMI. As if to confuse matters, from mid 1977 onwards Mountain gave singles by Nazareth their own NAZ-0 catalogue series.
Copyright 2009 Robert Lyons.