DECCA
RECORDS

 Decca was formed in 1929 by stockbroker Edward Lewis.  It acquired the rights to Brunswick records and to those of several other companies, and by the mid '30s it had become of one Britain's major players in the record business.  It started an American branch in 1934.  The '40s saw the company introducing the revolutionary FFSS recording system, which brought a lifelike clarity to its recordings and helped it to consolidate its place as one of the best Classical Music labels.  Decca flourished in the '30s and '40s with the likes of the Andrews Sisters and Jimmy Dorsey; Tommy Steele, Max Bygraves and Winifred Atwell, among others, kept the pot boiling through the 50s; while the company's major recording artists in the '60s included Billy Fury, the Bachelors, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and the Rolling Stones.  The '70s, however, were years of decline.   Some big names left, others lost their appeal, and eventually only the Moody Blues remained as a reminder of the times when Decca could boast a stable of world-famous artists.  In 1980 Sir Edward Lewis died; shortly afterwards the remains of his Decca empire were sold to Polygram.  The label continues as part of the Universal Music Group.  There were a lot of labels under the Decca umbrella: Emerald and Rex for Irish music, London for records licensed from American labels, MCA for products of US Decca, Brunswick, Chapter One, etc.  It had two Progressive Music subsidiaries: the short-lived Nova and the far more long-lasting and better-known Deram.  Singles were numbered in an 'F' series, starting at F-1501 in 1929; by the end of the '70s this had reached the F-13800s.  During 1960-71 quite a few singles had a '2' instead of the first figure '1'; for example, after F-13173 came F-23174, which was followed by F-13175.  According to Paul Pelletier's catalogue of Decca singles these 20000 series records had export restrictions placed on them; from 1971 onwards the suffix 'R', where 'F' became 'FR', gave the same indication.   As far as label design is concerned, after a somewhat sober start to the vinyl era it soon got a touch more exuberant); it stayed substantially the same from the mid '50s until.1968, when the 'boxed' logo was adopted.  The orange label with the boxed logo belongs to a Demand Performance' series, which came out in 1969; some records in the series were issued on a similarly-coloured London label.  The white label with the blue box appeared on at least one record aimed at the disco market; it is shown here by courtesy of Robert Bowes.  The same kind of boxed logos appeared on other labels in the Decca family (London, Rex) at that time, while the spiral sleeve design extended even further, to Deram, Emerald and MCA, and helped to establish a group identity.  In the late '50s and early '60s there were differently coloured labels for Classical music and for EPs, both of which had separate numerical series.  The advent of stereophonic records in 1958 was marked by the addition of the word 'STEREO' under the Decca logo. Former Address: The Decca Record Company Limited, Decca House, 9 Albert Embankment, London, SE1.