A rather obscure label, from Devon. Kingsley Leisure was a company which was responsible for a holiday village in Westward Ho, Bideford. There was a club there to provide entertainment for the holidaymakers, and it seems like a reasonable guess that the company made records of some of the acts that appeared there, presumably so that people could buy them as souvenirs. Catalogue numbers suggest that there were at least four releases. One was a Various Artists album, 'Cabaret At The Kingsley Leisure Club', which featured Ken Arnold, Kellie, the ABC Hit Band, Fred Davis and Graham Brown; it had a catalogue number of KLC-101, and came out in 1978. KLC-102 is currently unaccounted-for, but KLC-103 was a 1980 EP by Des Ford, 'Memories', containing the tracks 'The Way We Were', 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again', 'Sweet Caroline' and 'Words'; its matrix number, SJP-819, is one of a series used by the Fair Deal Studios (see 'Clubland' and 'SJP'). There's no date on the only Kingsley Leisure single that I've managed to track down, 'Day-O' b/w 'Disco Paradise' by Ezeke and Aqua-Vita (KL-1001), but I'm quietly confident that it was from the '70s. It seems probable that the first album and the first single were made without a huge gap in time between them; and in addition the Disco craze was on its way out by 1980, so 'Disco Paradise' seems likely to have been recorded before that time. If I had to bet on a year I'd choose 1979, but I wouldn't put a huge amount of money on it. The band must have got some mileage out of 'Day-O' as they released another (?) version on Drive Records (DRS-003) in 1982, calling it 'The Banana Boat Song' and substituting 'Dublin' for the Disco song. There are differences in the label design of the two Kingsley Leisure 7" records: the Des Ford EP kept the 'Seagull in front of the sun' logo but the label name changed in size and in font and shrank, the 'enclosure' around the top half of the label disappeared, and the printing was in black instead of dark blue. Thanks to Charlie Chalk of the 45cat site for the use of his scan here.
Copyright 2016 Robert Lyons.