One of Ireland's most prominent record labels, Release was founded by Mick Clerkin, Dermot Hegarty and Jimmy Magee. It put its first single out in 1968, and expired in the early '80s. The vast majority of its records were only released in the Republic, but in 1970-72 a number of them were pressed and released in Britain by Demon (later called Shannon) Distribution - a company of which Clerkin was a director. 'Record Retailer' of the 5th of September 1970 cites administrative problems and the lack of reliable stock of popular records as the reason for the pressings. By September 1970 Demon had been renamed Shannon; see the Demon and Shannon pages for details. The British pressings lacked the 'Made in the Republic of Ireland' which can usually be found on Release record from that country, and they had different logos to the Irish releases - the first and second types shown above (1 and 2, 3) seem to be peculiar to British releases, while the fourth (4) only appeared on Irish singles up to 1971 in that size; after that point it got noticably bigger. At least one single carried a reference to Demon Records (1), while on others the publishing details sometimes varied, 'Shannon Music' replaced the original Irish publishers in a number of cases. Dermot Hegarty's 'Twenty One Years' (RL-533) was hugely popular and can be found with a variety of labels. The first scan is slightly puzzling. It appears to be a UK issue of an Irish 1968 Dermot Hegarty single and it has a logo that was in use in Ireland from 1969-70; I would guess that it was released here after 'Twenty One Years', perhaps in an attempt to make the most of that record's success. Shannon was behind the UK issues of singles on several other Irish labels during this period; see Play, Ruby and Target. 'Music Week' of the 20th of April 1974 lists another Release single, 'Candy Girl' by Candida (RL-713), so that must have been issued here, presumably by Shannon; copies may well have been imported rather than pressed in the UK. According to the Music Master 'Book Of British Pop Singles 1975-84' a fair number of Release singles were made available on the mainland later in the decade; these all seem to have been imported, not made here (5), although, as can be seen from the company sleeve, Release did have offices in England. The vast majority of those singles were handled by Shannon, who were at the same address as that given on the sleeve above, but a few were handled by Spartan - which doesn't seem to have stocked imports generally - or by Northern Irish distributors Outlet. The discography below lists only British pressings, and singles which were available via the latter two companies. The catalogue numbers of the British pressings were the same as the Irish ones, and were in an RL-500 series. Manufacture of the few that I have been able to inspect was by Pye.
Copyright 2012 Robert Lyons.