Falling A Records is a British

Essex, England Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and Grea ...

-based independent record label, founded in the late 1970s by Barry Lamb and

Peter Ashby Peter Ashby is an English musician and composer, and a founder member of the bands Frenzid Melon, Spasmodic Caress and the insane picnic, as well as co-founder of Falling A Records with Barry Lamb. He was the original bass player and composer i ...

.,''Record Collector'', October 2011, no 393, page 54 born out of the D.I.Y cassette movement. It owned a shop in

Clacton-on-Sea Clacton-on-Sea is a seaside town in the Tendring District in the county of Essex, England. It is located on the Tendring Peninsula and is the largest settlement in the Tendring District with a population of 56,874 (2016). The town is situated ...

which sold new and second hand records, distributed fanzines such as New Crimes,

Vague In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word "prime" is ...

, Vox, Flipside, Juniper beri-beri, Blam!, and D.I.Y magazines/ comics including the very first copies of '' Viz''. It also distributed leaflets for various causes such as "anti-

apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

" and "anti-

vivisection Vivisection () is surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The word is, more broadly, used as a pejorative catch-all term for Animal testi ...

", music and politics being interlinked at the time. It had a roster of several bands on its own label, such as the insane picnic ''(sic)'', Standing Ovation and

Spasmodic Caress Spasmodic Caress were an English post punk/ new wave band, formed by Peter Masters, that played many gigs along the East Coast in Essex, Ipswich, Colchester and London between 1979 and 1984. They recorded a track for the 4AD Records 12" compilatio ...

, as well as cassettes and some vinyl it distributed for other D.I.Y cassette labels including Cause for Concern, Subway, Adventures in Reality,

Music for Midgets Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

, Third Mind and Colortapes. Many notable bands were distributed by Falling A, including The Cleaners from Venus featuring Martin Newell, the Modern Art,

Attrition Attrition may refer to *Attrition warfare, the military strategy of wearing down the enemy by continual losses in personnel and material **War of Attrition, fought between Egypt and Israel from 1968 to 1970 **War of attrition (game), a model of agg ...

The Pastels The Pastels are an indie rock group from Glasgow formed in 1981. They were a key act of the Scottish and British independent music scenes of the 1980s, and are specifically credited for the development of an independent and confident music scen ...

The Membranes The Membranes are an English post-punk band formed in Blackpool, Lancashire in 1977, the initial line-up being John Robb (bass guitar), Mark Tilton (guitar), Martyn Critchley (vocals) and Martin Kelly (drums).Larkin, Colin: ''The Guinness Wh ...

and Wavis O'Shave (also known as Foffo Spearjig). Some exclusive material was recorded for Falling A by The Cleaners from Venus and Foffo Spearjig among others. In 1985, the cassette culture was threatening the fabric of the established music industry, and Falling A's profile was such that it received the largest write up in the annual ''Music Week'' directory of UK record labels,''Music Week'' directory of UK record labels 1985 even more words than

EMI EMI Group Limited (originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records Ltd. or simply EMI) was a British Transnational corporation, transnational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in March 1 ...

. The label is still in existence as of July 2021. It is currently reissuing back catalogue on CD while releasing new music and creating a vast archival resource from all the memorabilia, ephemera and past product in its vaults.

References

External links

Official site
{{Authority control Cassette culture 1970s–1990s British independent record labels

See also

References

External links