Embassy Records: Covering the Market, Marketing the Cover

Abstract

To relate the history of the Woolworths‐owned Embassy records label is to simultaneously chart the history of the emergence and development of an authentic popular music in Britain. As cultural practice and commercial project, British popular music evolved, within a decade, from a peripheral and overlooked branch of the entertainment industry into one of the country's most prestigious and successful international activities. The years in which this change took place coincided exactly with the lifespan of Embassy records; ironically, the demise of one was caused by the ascendancy of the other. Although the silver and red label and its curious place in the topography of pop were familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in domestic popular music in the 1950s and 1960s, its history has been barely recorded and is frequently forgotten.

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