American record label. It was established by Decca in 1947 to issue in the USA items recorded in Britain and elsewhere in Europe; the distribution territory was later expanded to include Canada. Its catalogue was one of the first to include LPs, which were pressed in Britain by Decca and released in the USA from August 1949. In the same year issue began in the UK of American recording sessions. London was, therefore, not a record company per se but a label which licensed the products of other firms. In the early 1950s London acquired the British rights to the American Essex and Imperial labels and was at the forefront of the rock and roll boom, releasing records by artists such as Fats Domino and Bill Haley and the Comets. London also acquired rights to Atlantic (1955), Chess, Specialty (both 1956) and Sun (1957) and by the end of the decade had become the pre-eminent label for introducing new American acts into the British pop market. However, by the mid-1960s many of those companies from whom London held licences, such as Motown, Liberty, United Artists, Imperial, Chess and Atlantic, had taken their catalogues elsewhere, some worried that London's eclectic roster of acts was becoming too cumbersome.
By the early 1970s London's most successful label was the Memphis-based Hi Records who released records by soul acts such as Anne Peebles and Al Green. However, London's stock, like that of Decca itself, continued to fall during the decade and in 1980 Decca was sold. In the 1980s British synthesizer acts such as Blancmange and Bronski Beat kept the London label in the public eye, but the most successful group was Bananarama, the most popular female act of the decade in Britain. By the late 1990s London was distributing records as diverse as the trip-hop of Bristol's Portishead and the mainstream pop of Ace of Bass and All Saints.
DAVID BUCKLEY