THISTLE
A Scottish label, operating out
of 79 Berkeley Street, Glasgow. Thistle appears to have been the
record label of music publishers James S. Kerr, which had the same address. It seems
to have started issuing records circa 1962; the
company was still listed in the 'Music Master' catalogue for 1979 but according to
'Music Week' of the 9th of July 1977 it had been 'stagnant for some time' at
that point. 'Record Retailer' of the 21st of February 1968 mentioned that
Thistle had a recording studio and that the engineer was John Cutler; the
edition of the 26th of June reported that a new studio had been opened and
that Cutler was now the recording manager. Apart from those
snippets of news, Thistle seems to have ploughed its own furrow quite successfully
without featuring in the
Trade magazines. It released at least one hundred and
thirty two albums, numbering them in the BSLP-100s; singles were numbered in the TM-00s, EPs in
the RWEP-600s. Most of its 7" records came out
in the '60s but some appeared in the '70s: the few that
I have managed to trace are listed below, along with
a couple of 'markers', records from the '60s for which google gives a date
- sadly a lot of Thistle records had no date on the label. The
first three singles shown above are from the first half of the '60s. Thistle made a few football records
in the '60s and '70s, including one each for Everton and Manchester United as well
as for the obvious candidates Rangers and Celtic. The label design remained basically the same
except that the colours changed from gold-on-green (1) to a more
easily readable red-on-yellow (3) in or around 1964; some of the records
by football teams had labels depicting a football (2), others
had plain labels in the team's colours. Thanks to
Robert Bowes for that scan, and to Stephen Small
for discographical input.
Copyright 2008 Robert
Lyons.