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If in
doubt..get a scantily clad woman out!
Radio Stars - Dirty Pictures
4
different sleeves and some coloured vinyl for the Damned's Love Song.
It was a smasheroo!
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Lastly.
Lee Wood said he never understood basically the freebie
side of the business & promotion . How did you find
this running a small label ? What sort of promotion did
you give singles ? Well we used it to
full advantage I think. We were among the first to use
coloured vinyl and invented the multiple picture sleeve
with the four Damned shots on Love Song . Basically you
had to give records away to the chart return shops to
make sure that they had them in stock. Then a team of
housewives would go in and buy them up. Friendly dealers
might be encouraged to put in the extra sales in exchange
for a consideration. It was all dreadfully corrupt, but
at least everyone was being dreadfully corrupt. It was
viewed as a bit of a game. I would say however that you
couldn’t hype an absolute turkey and make it stick.
The record had to have some appeal to some section of the
populace or the act had to have a genuine following. It
was not unknown to co-opt fan clubs into buying up
singles from chart shops.
What was your best selling
punk single and worst ?
Best selling punk
single was probably Love Song and I haven’t a clue what the
worst seller was. Somewhere in the bowels of the accounts the
figure is there. Punk sold pretty well, it was some of the pop
stuff we did that turkied out.
In
the early ‘80s we got out of the pop end of things.
Partly we didn’t have a clue about the kind of
records that were becoming hits and partly the
introduction of the video seemed to really up the cost of
hyping to beyond a joke. It got to the point where you
would lose money on even a hit single and just hoped to
sell enough albums or break the act in America. Really
the odds lengthened at that point and we retired to
re-issue land where we have been happily ever since.
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