Ten rare English progressive records

Thirty-four pounds and sixty-eight pence. That’s what it cost to record one of the ten records below, and it’s why that one sits at the bottom of the list.

The order measures a single thing, which is how much company stood behind each record, and it runs downhill from the ones with a multinational’s catalogue number stamped on the label to the one with no label at all. Ten English records, 1969 to 1972. Almost none of them sold.

When the parent company put its own number on it

Gnidrolog, Lady Lake. RCA SF 8322, December 1972. Eight months earlier RCA had already put out the band’s first album as SF8261, so that’s two records inside one year, both of them carrying the big prefix rather than a boutique one.

Egg, The Polite Force. Deram SML 1074, 1971. Remember the three players on it. Dave Stewart, Mont Campbell, Clive Brooks. They come back further down the list under different names.

The labels invented for this music

Cressida, Asylum. Vertigo 6360 025, February 1971. That swirl is the most recognisable thing in the whole list today, and in February 1971 it was a two-year-old imprint nobody had a reason to trust yet.

Titus Groan. Dawn DNLS 3012, 1970. The name comes from Mervyn Peake’s 1946 novel, which matters one rung down.

Comus, First Utterance. Dawn DNLS 3019, February 1971. The band played at the Beckenham Arts Lab, a local club run by David Bowie, and the Pye deal followed a support slot for him at the Purcell Rooms.

We kept the Comus record in the office for a month and never once managed to have it on in the background. You listen or you switch it off.

Indian Summer. Neon NE 3, 1971. Neon was RCA’s progressive offshoot and it managed eleven albums in a little over a year before the company folded it. The catalogue runs NE 1 to NE 11, and it holds names you’ll find nowhere else: Tonton Macoute, Shape of the Rain, Raw Material.

Listen while you read

The small independents

Arzachel. Evolution Z 1003, 1969. The sleeve credits four musicians called Simeon Sasparella, Njerogi Gategaka, Basil Dowling and Sam Lee-Uff, and every one of those names is invented: they’re Steve Hillage, Mont Campbell, Clive Brooks and Dave Stewart. Which is to say Egg, from two rungs up, plus a guitarist.

Fuchsia. Pegasus PEG 8, 1971. Pegasus was the progressive branch of B&C, and Tony Durant had assembled the band out of Exeter students: three rock musicians plus a string trio of two violins and a cello.

The bottom of the ladder

Bram Stoker, Heavy Rock Spectacular. Windmill WMD 117, 1972. Windmill made its money on cheap compilations with pin-up sleeves, and when the tapes reached the office it put them out without telling the band.

Dark, Round the Edges. No label, 1972. Four lads from Northampton went into S.I.S. Studios on Military Road from 9 July onwards. Recording came to £34.68 and pressing to £87.17, and Steve Giles, who was earning six pounds a week at the time, picked up the bill.

They had thirty-two copies made. Those went well enough that they had thirty-two more.

How to read the ladder

The ones at the top had a press office, a distribution network and a catalogue number inside a series that kept going after them. The one at the bottom had a friend with a camera.

That distance has since flipped over. The records with a multinational behind them are reissued everywhere you look, and the one that cost under ninety pounds is the copy English collectors have been chasing for fifty years.

We heard the Dark reissue first and read those two figures afterwards, 34.68 and 87.17. Do it the other way round.