The second half of the 1970s was a time of innovation in the record industry, not so much in the new forms of music that appeared but in the way that vinyl was presented. The 12" single was born, the first picture disc (of modern times) appeared, shaped records made their debut, and coloured vinyl became commonplace. The search for a new gimmick started to get desperate: MCA seemed to have pushed innovation as far as it could go by putting both tracks of M's 'Pop Music' single on one side of a limited edition record, not one after the other, as is usual, but with their grooves side by side - when you dropped the stylus on the record you could never be sure what song would play. However, in 1979 the people behind GHM Productions - Mike Gatton, Roy Hurley and Ken Murray - came up with the ultimate: they issued a record which played backwards - not with the turntable revolving in reverse, I hasten to add, but one where the stylus travelled outwards from what is normally the run-off groove to the circumference. The 'B' side played the same song in the usual direction. 'Music Week' of the 30th of June noted that the trio, who were all writers and who had formed the company solely in order to put the single out, were looking for distribution. The article added that GHM was operating in association with production company Sesame Songs, of Surrey Sound Studios, Leatherhead. Copies of the single in question, 'Like A Dream' by Freda Gothenburg (GHM-1), still turn up, which indicates that quite a few people bought them at the time, probably out of curiosity, but the failure of search engines to find a GHM-2 suggests that the experiment wasn't successful enough to be repeated. Ten out of Ten for sheer chutzpah, though.
Copyright 2007 Robert Lyons.