These are properly part of Polygram, but they spent many years in the “Four major labels” era as one of the Big Four. In the late fifties and early sixties there were four significant groups in the UK, with EMI and Decca forming the elite top two, and with Philips and Pye competing for third place.
Move on to the school reunion, fifty years later.
Poor old Sir Eddie Decca, who was head of the Combined Cadet Force at school, passed away in London long ago.
Pye, the snappily-dressed wheeler and dealer in the playground, went bottom up years ago too, and all his assets, domestic and international, his wife Dawn, the office in Piccadilly, are now in others’ hands.
Good old E.M.I. Nipper, the head prefect at school, soldiered on with the family business. The Mk X Jag got a tad shabby and rusty, and that personalized plate HMV 1 was worth more than the car, and it’s years since he could afford to travel Stateside. The fact that he sold washing machines and hair dryers too was somewhat demeaning.
But the school nerd, the one with the funny foreign accent, arrives t the reunion in a helicopter. Hired for the day? No, the registration reads G-PHIL. It’s his. You’d think he’d get Vertigo. So what happened to old Philips? A very good marriage to a German heiress, Polly D’Or. Then his mum and dad’s company invented both the compact cassette and the compact disc. A bit of a traitor to vinyl then, but he’s turned out the most successful of the lot of them.
Record companies broadly divide into three; those with a background in electronics hardware, those with a background in film production and those run by genuine music people, the producer and manager labels. Philips is in the first group. It was a division of the Dutch electronics group, which was founded in 1891 manufacturing light-bulbs, then diversified into radios and gramophones and other electrical equipment. They bought the company which pressed records for Decca in Benelux in 1946.
They started the Philips record label in the Netherlands in 1950 with a classical list. They developed subsidiaries in Austria, Belgium and France initially. The first British releases came in January 1953.
Much of their initial record success lay in a deal with American Columbia, which appeared on Philips from 1953 until 1961, when it gained its own label, CBS, distributed by Philips. They could not use the Columbia brand in the UK, and in several other markets, because of EMI’s rival Columbia label. So they took the name of the parent company, CBS.
CBS saw the light and bought their own pressing plants, by acquiring Oriole in 1964. They also started their own distribution.
Notice the other stuff they’re advertising early on.
Clive Selwood, who worked for them in the early sixties, says in the early days (before his era) they saw records mainly as a way of increasing brand awareness for their electronics, and lost sixpence on every single sold.
They failed to foresee that with open reel tape, then cassettes they were creating the downfall of their own vinyl sales. Then they manufactured tape recorders, then cassette recorders. Why worry?
This runs through. Having invented the compact cassette launched in 1963, Philips developed the first CDs and CD players in conjunction with Sony in 1982. The huge Dire Straits 1980s tours (on Philips’ Vertigo label) had massive advertising for CDs and CD players attached.
cassette- 1963, compact disc – 1964
The humble cassette is making a comeback in 2024, due to nostalgia from those who had their first music experience. Little do they know of tape print through, let alone a limited dynamic range. When I was teaching ELT in 1971 we had early sturdy Philips portable cassette players. They were used all day every day (and the heads were cleaned weekly). In 1980 they still sounded very good, as they did when I returned to speak there in 1985. They outlived Tandbergs and Sonys bought after them.
Philips also launched video tape systems culminating in V2000. It was launched in 1979 and dead by 1987. Enthusiasts say it was far better than early VHS, but so was Sony’s Betamax. The struggle to compete with JVC’s VHS system helped persuade Philips and Sony to co-operate on producing the CD format. That was a return to the deals of 1953, as Sony had acquired Columbia / CBS in the meantime.
Other American labels distributed by Philips were Mercury (taken from EMI), Riverside and folk specialists Vanguard (originally released on Fontana).
Philips ran a budget label, Wing, which released the first-ever Merseybeat single: Let’s Twist by Howie Casey and The Seniors, in 1961.
Fontana was Philips’ other major imprint. With complimentary sleeves , it’s best to think of them as twins. Not identical twins, because Fontana was just a tad younger (in its appeal). It’s hard to see however why Johnny Cash (Don’t Take Your Guns To Town) was on Philips, while Marty Robbins with similar gunslinger sentiments was on Fontana for El Paso.
Philips had a mean spell, with ‘one sleeve fits all’ sleeve with a joint Philips / Fontana label stressing the relationship
This is Philips radio airplay on Radio Luxemburg between 1960 and 1963.
| Philips | 40% |
| Fontana | 36% |
| CBS | 21% |
| Riverside | 3% |
Before the distribution deal giving CBS its own label early in 1962, it was virtually 50/50 Philips/Fontana. A very high proportion of the Philips releases were from US Columbia, which became CBS in the UK.
In 1962/63 Philips, Fontana and CBS are almost equal. CBS and Riverside share the Philips advert.
You can bet that the same designer did the next Fontana sleeve design and the CBS 1962 design:
The February 1964 advert shows the Philips and Philips distributed labels united in one advert: Philips, Fontana, CBS, Mercury.
That’s an interesting week for releases. Boys Cry got to UK #8. Move Over Darling was also a UK#8 hit. A Fool Never Learns scraped into the Top 40 at #40. You Don’t Own Me failed to chart in the UK, but was very well-known. Miracles by Kiki Dee is collectible.
While EMI was forming Harvest, Decca was forming Deram and Pye was forming Dawn, Philips naturally had to have its own progressive label, Vertigo.
As Philips moved closer into the arms of the Polydor / DGG Group, they started distributing independent labels, Immediate, Planet and Page One. Co-operation with the Polydor group had started back in 1962, with a joint Philips-Deutsche Grammophon venture, Phonogram.
Clive Selwood was in at the start of that venture too. In his autobiography All The Moves – None of the Licks, he tells a story that I’ve heard before. It goes like this:
Polydor merged with Philips to form Phonogram, and executives were sent to the UK from Germany to analyze the new business. After much research, they met with the new Chief Executive who announced that he had solved the problems of the record industry and had found the cure. “In future,” he announced, “We shall only release hits!”
That story’s an old chestnut which goes back to the 1920s or 1930s film industry and may have originated with Mayer, Goldwyn, Cohn or some other amusingly quotable movie mogul. It has been applied to other record executives, but as in any parable, that does not undermine the underlying truth.
In 1972, the various Polydor, DGG and Philips labels combined as PolyGram, but right through the 70s and 80s a unified Phonogram company sleeve appeared on their host of labels. And there were dozens of small labels distributed by Polygram. Nearly all the labels used Phonogram’s pressing facilities when they ran short of pressings with hit records. Polygram had largely gone over to injection moulded printing of disc labels (see Pressings) and the designs are crude versions of the parent centre labels and often came in generic Phonogram sleeves.
Since 1998, Polygram (and therefore Philips) has been part of the Universal Music Group. Divisions within that group use the long-since acquired name Decca for classical releases, and so Philips Classical disappeared and became part of that. The Philips pop catalogue comes as part of the Mercury division.
Philips labels (red when the articles are up):
Philips
Philips – 45 sleeves and centres
Fontana
Fontana – 45 sleeves and centres
Riverside
Vanguard
Vertigo
Around and Around 