About Jungle Records
- Martin Aston, from the ‘Mint Humbucker’ notes.
Jungle Records (Bravour Limited trading as) began back in the vinyl days of 1982, founded by music fanatics who had been working at Fresh Records and Distribution.
Philosophically and emphatically independent, Jungle continues be excited about new music as well as cataloguing the past.
Personnel
Alan Hauser formed his first indie label Parole in 1977, with a background in band management, live promotion and collector’s records.
Graham Combi worked for The Who’s trucking company before joining Fresh. Responsible for the Mint label, the mail-order service and much more.
Damon Wigley of Figured In honed his accounting skills at World Circuit Records and the British Film Institute. Since 2015 he's been making financial sense of what we do.
History
In the beginning, the Fresh Records catalogue was bought and an indie distribution service established. Jungle became an ‘unofficial’ member of ‘The Cartel’ indie network and the sole supplier to Our Price Records as they expanded from 40 to over 200 stores, of all indie product, including hits by New Order, Depeche Mode & The Smiths, until 1986. The company then concentrated on the label and now has a digital catalogue of around 3,000 tracks.
Steve Brown started Red Records in 1979, and managed The Lines. He left Jungle in the late 80’s to manage Fields of the Nephilim full time. John Knight headed Jungle’s distribution until we were squeezed out by Rough Trade's. He went on to create SRD Distribution, now managed by the staff. Many, many others have been an important part of Jungle over the years; our thanks go out to them all.
(Jungle sometimes is listed as 'Freud Records'. Our vinyl singles launched in '82 with a prefix of JUNG. Word-associating Carl Jung & Sigmund Freud, the album prefix became FREUD. We didn't imagine that SRD and then databases like Amazon and Allmusic would mix it up forever.)
The catalogue itself tells the story of the artists we've worked with. A short 2010 film of Jungle and our old Camden premises, made by Key Production, can be seen here. More background than you probably need to know can be heard in a lengthy and unedited interview with Alex Ogg, here, or on Youtube in five 10-minute chunks. One day we'll see if we dare post more entertaining clips from our archives.
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