Star is one of those labels which serves a niche market for a long time, existing largely outside the mainstream musical world. It was set up in Balsall Heath in 1970 by record shop owner Muhammad Ayub, initially in order to record a couple of local Bhangra bands. The venture proved successful. Star evolved into Oriental Star, later the Oriental Star Agency / OSA, and became Britain's leading Asian record label. It was responsible for recording Bally Sagoo and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, both of whom gained wide recognition in the 'World Music' field, and it is still going today. As far as 7" records are concerned, catalogue numbers suggest that there ought to be at least twenty-four of them but googling reveals only fourteen, all but one of them EPs. The others may well exist, as Oriental Star was fairly prolific; they're just not the kind of records which turn up on ebay or other sites all that often. Numbering appears to have been mainly in an SR-100 series which reached at least SR-124 around 1979; stereo records were prefixed S/SR. Some of the records were made through custom recording firm Zella (q.v), and they have additional numbers in Zella's own JHEPS-200 series. At least one EP was manufactured by EMI in Pakistan (1); thanks to Nicholas Hough for that scan, which as been doctored to make it useable here. Others was made by Lyntone (2) and Linguaphone (3). The records which were made through Zella were Decca pressings (3) - that scan appears by kind permission of Dr. Doom of the 45cat site. LPs were mainly numbered in the SRLP-5000s; the highest number that I have found so far is SRLP-5127, which came out in 1991, but by that point CDs were taking over.
Copyright 2014 Robert Lyons.