1960 Domino Records The Ditchburn Recording studio and Record Label, by Arthur Phillips

In 1960 Ditchburn Equipment of Dock Road Lytham in Lancashire, was now a distributor and operator of Jukeboxes and no longer a Juke-box manufacturer. they had moved their manufacturing production line to Vending Machines and BGM ( Back-Ground Music ) they had started to manufacture under license from the Symphonaire Company in America a back ground music system. We were given two tapes of about two hours long to duplicate for the machines, this of course was not a large enough catalogue for the English market so we opened up a recording studio in London and to avoid paying copyright for music, Ditchburn opened the studio to session musicians and they were paid a fee for their services, we recorded hundreds of tracks and most were out of copyright these were put on to NAB cassettes playing for about 2 Hours at 1-7/8 inches per second, to provide back ground music for the machines, copyright was not an issue nor were performing rights as the music was fully in the public domain and the library of tapes numbered about 500 in different genres of music. We also recorded music from a variety of bands for various record labels and quite a lot of freelance groups to make demo records just to keep the costs down and the studio going. At the time you could not operate a recording studio without a record label so the name of the label was chosen as Domino, this was also the name of the Ditchburn works social club which was called THE DOMINO CLUB so technically the club owned the record labels. The Domino record labels lasted twelve years (12 years) from its inception to the studio being closed down in January 1970 and the tape duplicating services being moved to Dock Road Lytham. The last record to be issued in 1971 was the Black and White minstrels on RD 103 the label was sold to MAM on the acquisition of the Ditchburn Organisation in September 1972. Music and Management had a fair catalogue of acts on their books and as we know spanned the world making releases in every country not bad for a company that started in 1970 and went through to 1983. Our first releases were in Denmark of all places and licensed the label to Danrecord over a period of three years we released 67 recordings from 1960 to 1963 and one in Germany. We also released three under the Red Domino label in 1971 and 16 under the parent domino label oh and one under the Domino recording label from 1964. None of these were foisted on the renters of jukeboxes but if they wanted one, they could have one and some did. I can not differentiate any difference between the Black (original) and the Red label they were both the same to me. So the record label was simply just a means to an end, no more, no less. In all we produced 15,750,000 records over 12 years most of which were licensed from other vendors. Arthur Phillips Head Audio Engineer 1969-1973 and chairman of the Domino Club 1967-1973

The Complete Domino Records back catalogue.

We Have been contacted by Paul Latham, who is a keen collector of the Ditchburn Record releases, Paul has all of the UK Domino releases, and all the releases of the Spiral Label, which was another Ditchburn record label which started in 1971. The music style on the Spiral label changed from the traditional Domino Pub sing-along style to a more contemporary style. we have added the Spiral Back catalogue to the Domino releases below.

7” Singles Marked with a are in the Ditchburn Collection.