FANFARE

   

A studio and custom recording concern, based in Swiss Cottage, London.   The company appears to have made acetates, and to have arranged for records to be made from masters that were recorded in other studios.  Records on the Fanfare label were produced from the 1960s into at least the early '80s.  As might be expected, the fare was varied; it features tracks by acts such as Folk group Merruwyn, Trad Jazzers the New City Jazzmen, and the choir of All Saints church in Stock Harbard.  There's no date on the Mervyn Francis EP shown above, 'Love With Mervyn Francis' (FR-2061), but the style of the matrix number on the run-off was helpful because it revealed that pressing of that record was by EMI; the Stone Gang Show record wasn't an EMI pressing.  Initially numbering seems to have been in the FR-6400s, but by 1973 this had changed to FR-2000; albums, EPs and singles shared the same series.  The highest number of the FR-2000s that I have seen listed was FR-2371, which is reportedly from 1980, but it is notoriously difficult to track down private pressings and there may well have been other records issued after that one.   For the sake of interest (!) I have included albums from the '70s in the 'discography' below, but as can be seen there are far more gaps than there are entries.  Some records seem to have used Fanfare numbers as matrix numbers and to have come out on other labels; see 'Scratch' for an example.  At least one record with a Fanfare number came out on a different label; see 'Wax (1974)'.  There was another Fanfare label in the '70s - a division of Music For Pleasure, if I remember rightly.  It only issued albums, which puts it outside the scope of this site.  There was also a Pop one in the '80s, which had hits with the likes of Sinitta.

Copyright 2008 Robert Lyons.