A subsidiary of Jonathan King's UK label, dedicated to material licenced from American labels. UK American first saw the light of day in January 1975. It received its first mention in 'Music Week' of the 18th of that month: the article described it as "U.K.'s Disco label" and quoted Clive Selwood as saying that its launch was "In line with our ultimate goal of moving from a successful small independent company to a place among the majors." It issued sixteen singles without troubling the Chart compilers, and appears to have closed down around the middle of 1976. As with its parent label, manufacture and distribution were by Decca / Selecta at first (1). Polydor / Phonodisc took over in mid '75, at which point injection-moulded labels were adopted. At least two singles from the Decca era was re-pressed with injection-moulded labels (2); the first, Brenda Lee Jones's 'You're The Love Of My Life', originally USA-8, was also re-numbered, being given one of UK's six-digit Polydor numbers, 2012-004. After that, numbering returned to the original USA-0 series. The label design, which was an adaptation of the main UK one, remained the same throughout; demo copies were overprinted with an 'A' and the appropriate wording. As an aside, it should be mentioned that shortly after the introduction of UK American there was a dispute between UK and Island over the use of the 'USA' prefix, which Island was using for its recently-introduced 'Island USA' label. It was settled in a civilized and inexpensive way, by the toss of a coin. UK won the toss, but a compromise was reached - Island retained the prefix but changed the numbering associated with it in order to help distinguish between the two catalogue series ('MW', 15th February 1975).
Copyright 2006 Robert Lyons.