Gosport Sound Products was basically a disc-cutting service. It cut one-off acetates and also masters, and was run by sound-archivist Peter Copeland in parallel with his other jobs - he worked for the BBC and later for the National Sound Archive. GSP transferred private recordings onto vinyl, presumably often in tiny quantities; it also made limited pressings of items such as the White On Black Folk Group EP 'Our Kind Of Folk', shown above (2), which were intended for sale to the general public. The catalogue number of that EP, EPC-767, and the matrix number, GSP-90202, indicate that there should be lots of other records on the Gosport Sound Products label out there, but by their very nature they are hard to find; the few that I have managed to dredge up are listed below. Given the lack of its products to examine, it is impossible to say with any accuracy when GSP started to make records and when it stopped. Frederick French-Pounce has been kind enough to supply a scan of a single which a band called The Sombreros made through GSP in June 1964, though at that point white labels appear to have been used rather than printed ones (1); the single featured I Don't Care' and 'Hoochie Coochie' and had matrix numbers of GSP51015 and GSP-9125. It is possible that the company was making records for several years before that, but it doesn't seem to have lasted long into the 1970s. Despite its name the company operated out of Anerley, London SE20, at first, then out of Bristol; Mr. Copeland called it 'Gosport' after the area in which he grew up.
Copyright 2008 Robert Lyons.