When I first started putting this site together I had to decide how to handle two different kinds of label. One was the 'vanity' kind, where major companies used labels with a distinctive design on records by favoured artists; the one used by EMI for Queen is probably the best-known example, but there were many more. The other was the 'plain' kind, where custom recording companies - SRT for example - sometimes left their own names off record labels and just put that of the artist on them, along with the titles. I decided against giving either types pages, on the grounds that if I did I would end up with dozens of single-artist pages such as 'Buzzcocks', '999', 'Sherwin Knight Junior School' and so on. I did however decide that if a record had the artist's name twice on each label, one of them in a larger font than the other, the larger one could qualify as the label name. This was intended to help me to provide some extra categorization for custom recordings, but it provided a loophole through which a few 'vanity' labels were able to squeeze. 'Shann Lee Parker' is one of them, 'X-Ray Spex' and 'Elvis' (q.v. both) are others. As can be seen from the scan, unlike Queen or Buzzcocks singles, the artist's name appears twice, once as part of a logo and once in the same font as the titles. Because of that, 'Shann Lee Parker' has a page here and 'Queen' hasn't. I don't suppose for a moment that 'Shann Lee Parker' is treated as a distinct label anywhere else in the universe, but as I made the rule I have to stick with it.
'Be Good To Yourself' b/w 'Loving Arms' (2059-112; 4/79) was Shann Lee's first single of two for Polydor in 1979-80. The other, 'Can't Nobody Love You' b/w 'Lifts Me Higher' (2059-260; 7/80) had standard Polydor red injection moulded labels, as indeed had the majority of copies of 'Be Good To Yourself'. However, a contract pressing by Pye resulted in paper labelled copies of the latter, such as the one shown above, which had a separate name and logo. It's solely because of those copies that 'Shann Lee Parker' has a page on this site.
Copyright 2024 Robert Lyons.