29th June 2015

It’s Our Birthday!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! 45 YEARS TODAY!! YAY!!!
Well, although we don’t got no birth certificate to prove the specifics of Fly’s entrance into the wonderful world of music, but 45 years ago to this very day, Monday the 29th June 1970, the FLY RECORD label was established. It was set up by DAVID PLATZ and managed by MALCOLM JONES, who had quit his post as EMI Record’s A&R just three days earlier.

Neither of them are with us any longer, so in the glorious London sunshine we raise a glass in their honour for all the work they put into kick-starting the label. Whilst sales back then overshadow current demand, the love, impact and sheer life-enhancing value of the catalogue they initiated has aged well. And with the additional interest in late 20th Century music the label’s music continues to inspire and connect with people of all ages, from casual listeners to foraging musicologists.
You’ll see a note about David Platz in our blog from the 20th May 2015.
In the mid-sixties, Malcolm Jones graduated from Manchester University and landed a post at EMI Records’ working in A&R. His involvement in Love Sculpture’s 1968 UK TOP 5 hit ‘Sabre Dance’ gave him leverage to approach the EMI board members and propose the development of a radical new record label to embrace and popularise the burgeoning underground music scene. The board took some convincing but eventually approved his plan. The label was called HARVEST RECORDS, whose legacy is as much for its left-field music as its lavishly produced album packaging, which captured the synergy between music and art at a particularly creative cultural moment.
Malcolm had also inherited the role of David Platz’s go-to guy at EMI at the time of Platz’s secondment of EMI’s label imprint REGAL ZONOPHONE – solely dedicated to music from Platz’s production companies.
By 1970 Platz had become frustrated that the hit singles his company were providing could not be matched by similar album success by EMI/REGAL ZONOPHONE; at the same time EMI’s hierarchy were reigning in Jones’ penchant for cost over efficiency, curtailing the HARVEST budget. When Platz found a lukewarm response to his latest submission, T. Rex’s ‘Ride A White Swan’ (at the time a radical idea for a single being as it didn’t have any drums!), he began planning his own outlet. With advice from his friends, and managers of The Who, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, Platz poached a more than ready to jump ship Jones offering him the post as manager of the new record label, Fly Records.
The music that spans the associated FLY catalogue are incredible aural nuggets from a time long gone. The music’s potency remains as life enhancing as ever, something even their creators could not have estimated way-back then.