An independent Folk Music label from Duffield, in Derbyshire. Free Reed was owned and run by concertina enthusiast Neil Wayne. It started out as a mail order company for Folk records but eventually, in 1975, it started issuing records of its own. 'Music Week' of the 13th of November 1976 observed belatedly that the label had been launched, and said that the first eight albums had been pressed by Plastic Sound, of Wales. 'MW' of the 16th of July 1977 noted that the company had signed a distribution deal with Selecta - pressing was still being done by Plastic Sound, but the article indicated that other manufacturers would be used if the demand required it. The final mention of Free Reed came in 'MW' of the 4th of November 1978, which said that it was looking to license a couple of tracks, 'Jogging Along With Me Reindeer' and 'Pepper In The Brandy', from an album by John Kirkpatrick as a prospective single; that never happened, but a re-recorded version of 'Jogging' surfaced a couple of years later on Dingle's Records (q.v.) numbered SID-226. Sadly the Kirkpatrick album turned out to be Free Reed's last.
In addition to John Kirkpatrick, Free Reed had other prominent Folk artists on its books, Peter Bellamy, Sue Harris and Robin & Barry Dransfield among them. There were also promising newcomers like the Old Swan Band and Flowers And Frolics. Traditional Irish material was catered for as well, in the form of a joint series of LPs put out in co-operation with Topic (q.v.). All but one of the company's releases were albums, but it managed a sole single: Les Barker's, 'Holland's Meat Pies' b/w 'Sparky's Magic Contraceptive' (FRY-1; 1977), which was reportedly only available at gigs. As can be seen from the scan which Les himself has kindly sent along, the single's label (1) was plain black-on-white, in contrast to the more decorative album label (2). The pressing marks on it strongly suggest that Linguaphone was responsible for manufacture. Free Reed was reborn in the CD age, and, from its new home in Belper, it provided boxed sets of historic material by the likes of Fairport Convention and Ashley Hutchings as well as reissues of its '70s LPs.
Copyright 2007 Robert Lyons.