Mr Locantro knows his onions, from Berliner’s to HMV!

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Nipper

By Tony Locantro

When The Gramophone Company first started to operate in the UK, the discs were 7-inches in diameter and carried the title: ‘E. BERLINER’S GRAMOPHONE’.

This was soon replaced by the drawing of a recording Angel, and the Angel remained in use for about ten years. Playing time on the 7-inch discs was only around two minutes and very soon the disc sizes of 10-inch and 12-inch with longer playing times came into general use.

The above advert from 1905 shows the Angel trademark on all three disc size then currently in use.

The 7-inch discs disappeared soon afterwards, and by about 1909 the image of the dog and trumpet replaced the Angel logo as the company’s main label.

Last to come on the discs around 1910 was the wording ‘His Master’s Voice’ which replaced the words ‘Gramophone Concert Record’ and ‘Gramophone Monarch Record’ that were being used on 10-inch and 12-inch discs. Thus the familiar HMV label was established and it remained in use in a similar form for the next 70 years on 78s and subsequently LPs and 45s until the CD arrived in the 1980s.

Fred Gaisberg’s first foreign recording trip..London to Leipzig

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Nipper

The Gramophone Company decided to step up their recording programme in 1899 by sending Fred Gaisberg to the continent to record local artists in several countries. He was to take the recently arrived William Sinkler Darby with him as his assistant. It was to be the first of many great adventures that the two would share in pursuit of “capturing the sounds out of the air.” Here is a picture of the pair of them messing about. Fred is the one looking devotedly at his partner.

The “portable” recording equipment they took with them was anything but… It comprised six large packing cases which weighed up to 260lb’s each.

The first stop of their trip was Hanover to view the progress that Joe Sanders had made with the disc manufacturing factory. In Germany they picked up a fellow traveller; one Theodore Birnbaum who was Managing Director of The Gramophone Company in Berlin. Birnbaum would fund the trio’s travel as they moved around and recorded in Germany.

Birnbaum was the man who, in 1898, had designed the Angel logo that would become famous both as part of The Gramophone Company and also as a label within successor company, EMI. Here is a picture of him from that time.

Birnbaum was in fact a Londoner, born in 1865 to Russian-German parents. He would go on to a significant career with The Gramophone Company in both Russia and Germany.

The three of them reached Leipzig in May 1899 and began sessions on May 17th. Their very first recordings sessions in their first “foreign” city would reap 213 7″ recordings. Recorded artists included the Leipziger Musiker Vereiningung

This is Leipzig Marketplace at the turn of the twentieth century (the photo is from a very early Gramophone Company catalogue):

You can see some of the records made in 1899 in the same catalogue.

Every picture tells a story.

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Nipper

This is a scanned page of a Gramophone Company catalogue from 1902. The company had progressed from making 7″ records to 10″ records by late 1901 and this catalogue shows the new range of discs retailing at 5 shillings a piece. There were 20 shillings to a £, so five shillings expressed in modern money would be 25p. The gramophone cost £10.

Quiz Question: What would these amounts be worth in todays prices? Answer is below the picture.

According to t’interweb, five shillings in 1902 was worth £23 in todays money, so people were paying the equivalent of £23 per track. When compared with todays 79p download from itunes this means that the value of music in 1902 was 30 times greater than today.

Meanwhile the £10 gramophone would have an equivalent price of £910 in todays money. An ipod costs £200 today so the 1902 technology is only 4.5 times the modern equivalent.

Fred Gaisberg the Zelig of early recording was inevitably involved with the record that is featured in the catalogue. The Thunderer March was written by John Sousa who was hugely popular band leader and composer (speciality: marches) and helped develop a new instrument for marching bands that was named after him called a Sousaphone.

John Sousa

The Sousaphone

Gaisberg new Sousa when he was a child: “I also sang in Sousa’s choir..and I attended rehearsals in his then modest home in the Navy Yard in South Washington…..I can still see the small room that one entered direct from the street and a very old “tin-panny” square piano from which he conducted rehearsals.”

When Fred worked for Columbia he recorded John Sousa’s Band and did so again when he helped set up The Gramophone Company.

The recording of The Thunderer included in the catalogue is not by Sousa himelf but by a London band. Its interesting to see the angel logo on this disc which had been used for only a few months when this record came out. It was one of the labels that The Gramophone Company used over the next few years and successor company EMI turned to the logo when they set up Angel Records in 1953. You can see a detailed history of the Angel logo here.

Sound Of The Hound

careful, he nips a bit

Tag Archives: angel logo

Mr Locantro knows his onions, from Berliner’s to HMV!

Fred Gaisberg’s first foreign recording trip..London to Leipzig

Every picture tells a story.