BOOKS & ARTS
From Buddy Holly
to Pavarotti
Max Décharné
Decca, The Supreme Record
Company: The Story of Decca
Records, 1929—2019
by Darren Henley and Daryl Easlea
Elliott & Thompson, £50, pp. 378
In 1929 in America, Dashiell Hammett
published his debut hardboiled novel Red
Harvest, over in Paris Buñuel and Dalí
began showing their film Un Chien Andal-
ou at a small cinema, while in Britain the
fledgling Decca Record Company opened
for business.
Issued to mark 90 years of the label’s
existence, this large format, fully illustrat-
ed volume benefits greatly from access to
its extensive archive of the days when Bil-
lie Holiday, Kathleen Ferrier, Tom Jones,
Pavarotti, Bing Crosby, Buddy Holly, Her-
bert von Karajan, Billy Fury, Marianne
Faithfull, George Formby, Slaughter & the
Dogs, Georg Solti, Benny Hill, Winston
Churchill and even the Playboy Club Bun-
nies appeared on Decca or its subsidiaries.
Decca’s history is inextricably bound
up with that of its founding director, Sir
Edward Lewis, who persuaded a successful
gramophone manufacturer of that name
to move into the record business. Shares in
the new company began trading in Febru-
ary 1929, and that they survived the subse-
quent Depression and went on to establish
a formidable artist roster in the 1930s was
in no small part due to Lewis’s abilities
and perseverance. In January 1980, weeks
before his death, he sold the company to
the Dutch conglomerate PolyGram, after
which its historic studio in West Hamp-
stead was closed and its pressing plant and
head office building disposed of. Although
the Decca name has since been retained
through several corporate buyouts, some
might argue that the real story ended with
Sir Edward.
The editors have assembled some fine
writers to contribute individual sections
exploring the label’s varied output. Michael
Gray provides fascinating details on the
origin of Decca’s industry-leading full fre-
quency range recording process, developed
during wartime to track U-boats; while Lois
Wilson is equally good at telling the story of
the US Decca offshoot, which scored many
hits with artists such as Louis Jordan and
Bill Haley.
Jon Savage covers the glory years
of 1950s and 1960s British pop in fine
form, when the Rolling Stones, Them and
the Who cut timeless albums for the label.
It’s worth noting, however, that when dis-
cussing Joe Meek’s unique 1962 com-
position and production, ‘Telstar’ by
The Tornados, reaching No. 1 in Ameri-
ca, he says only two British acts had ever
achieved that position before — Laurie
London in 1958 and Acker Bilk in 1962.
In fact, someone got there ahead of them in
1952, becoming the first foreign artist to top
the Billboard charts. It was Vera Lynn, with
the million-selling ‘Auf Wiederseh’n Sweet-heart’, released by Decca, the label she’d
been with since 1937, and for whom, aged
102, she wrote a foreword to this book.
This is a very good-looking production,
a sumptuous and substantial LP-sized
coffee table book, although it is question-
able whether the average reader desper-
ately needed five pictures devoted to the
1978 novelty act Father Abraham & the
Smurfs. Nevertheless, the clear reproduc-
tion of large quantities of vintage press clip-
pings preserved by the company’s publicists
is very welcome. ‘Text © Decca Records’
reads the verso page, and it is certainly the
story as they wish it to be told.
That said, there is much to enjoy here,
always allowing for the inevitable shifts of
mood between sections. Those who appreci-
ate the very good accounts of the technical
challenges of recording opera in the imme-
diate post-war era may not want in-depth
examinations of the rock and pop cata-
logue, and vice versa. However, perhaps the
book’s main value is as a survey of the sheer
range of activities of one of the key players
in the industry.
Throughout the volume there is a com-
pulsive tendency to name-drop David
Bowie. Yes, Decca’s subsidiary, Deram,
released various singles and his Antho-
ny Newley-obsessed debut LP in 1967 —
and swiftly dropped him when they didn’t
sell — but he also recorded for Pye and
Parlophone, finally scoring a hit for Phil-
lips in 1969 before his lengthy run of clas-sics for RCA. Despite appearing here on
14 different pages scattered across the
book, his sole hit for the label was the 1973
post-Ziggy cash-in reissue of the 1967 com-
edy single ‘The Laughing Gnome’.
Some readers will not agree with
chapters covering the 21st-century cata-
logue which suggest that releasing mass-
market ‘classical crossover’ artists such
as Katherine Jenkins and Russell Wat-
son is somehow following in the tradi-
tion of the days when the company put
out works such as Britten’s War Requiem.
Dismay might also greet Adam Sweet-
ing’s claim that Handel was ‘the Andrew
Lloyd Webber of his generation’, or the
current vice president Tom Lewis refer-
ring to signing Donny Osmond in 2002 as
one of the label’s ‘key acts’. Indeed, the
middle-of-the-road artists, classical-lite
orchestras, royal wedding souvenirs and
military bands of recent years may sell
in impressive numbers, but as former
Decca recording artist and jazz musician
Spike Milligan once remarked: ‘If you’ll
stand for the national anthem, you’ll stand
for anything.’Decca’s full frequency range
recording process was developed
during wartime to track U-boatsReleased by
Decca in 1966,
Tom Jones’s
third album was
changed for
the US market,
as the nuclear
explosion on
the cover was
considered too
alarming