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 one or two 'vanity' labels were able to squeeze. 'Slim Whitman 25th Anniversary' is one of them, 'X-Ray Spex' and 'Brinsley Schwarz' (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 an identifier and and once in the same font as the titles. Because of that, 'Slim Whitman 25th Anniversary' has a page here and 'Queen' hasn't. I don't suppose for a moment that it is treated as a distinct label anywhere else in the universe, but as I made the rule I have to stick with it. A single by Slim, 'Rose Marie' b/w 'We Stood At The Altar' (UP-35575; 8/73), and a live LP, '25th Anniversary Concert' (UAG-29488), were the only records to have that kind of label, though some copies of the single can be found with the common-or-garden United Artists one.
Copyright 2023 Robert Lyons.