Festival Records

Festival was established by one of Australia's first merchant banking companies, Mainguard, founded by entrepreneur and former Australian army officer Paul Cullen. Mainguard had a wide range of investments including one of Australia's first supermarket companies, and a whaling business and also backed famed Australian filmmaker Charles Chauvel. Another early staff member was Bruce Gyngell, who was later hired to help found Australia's first commercial TV station, TCN-9, in Sydney and was the first person to appear on television in Australia in 1956. The connection between Nine and Festival would reap great benefits for the label in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Festival was able to gain a foothold in the Australian music market mainly thanks to Welch, who acquired the Australian rights to the epoch-making Bill Haley record "Rock Around the Clock". The single had originally been turned down by the Australian division of EMI in 1954, when it was first released in the United States, but Welch was able to trump EMI and secure the Australian rights to the recording for Festival in 1955, after the song became a big hit in America and Britain thanks to its inclusion in the film Blackboard Jungle. "Rock Around the Clock" became the biggest-selling record ever released in Australia up to that time, and it established Festival as a significant emerging player in the popular music market. When Mainguard began diverting Festival's profits into its other businesses, Welch resigned. He was replaced by disc jockey and former record store clerk Ken Taylor. Like Welch, Taylor did not like rock 'n' roll, but he was an astute spotter and marketer of new talent. Thanks to Taylor, Festival was the first local label to sign Australian rock 'n' roll acts, including Australia's "Big Three" acts of the 1950s: Johnny O'Keefe and the Dee Jays, Col Joye and the Joy Boys and Dig Richards and the R'Jays. Festival's sales trebled, but by this time Mainguard was in serious financial straits and in 1957 Cullen sold Festival to property magnate LJ Hooker. Hooker was an avid music fan and reportedly took a keen personal interest in the company, even establishing his own boutique imprint label, Rex, named after the Sydney hotel that he owned. During this time, Festival had its first home-grown hit with Johnny O'Keefe's "Wild One" (aka "Real Wild Child"), a song covered in the US by Jerry Allison of the Crickets (as Ivan) in 1958 and also recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis for Sun Records. Both artists had heard O'Keefe perform the song during their 1958 Aussie tour and rush recorded the song on their return to the US. This Festival success was followed by four #1 hits in 1959 for another local act, Col Joye & the Joy Boys. But despite the chart success, Festival continued to lose money due to poor management and a lack of international acts on its roster, and Hooker eventually sold it on to Rupert Murdoch's News Limited in 1961, shortly after Murdoch's attempt to acquire the Australian division of the American Ampar label. As with the Bill Haley single, Festival was again saved by a then-unknown American act—in this case, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, who had been recommended to Festival in 1962 by top Sydney DJ Bob Rogers. The Tijuana Brass' breakthrough record, "The Lonely Bull" became a worldwide hit and its success in Australia enabled Festival to sign a crucial distribution deal with Alpert's label A&M Records, who supplied Festival with a stream of top-selling U.S. acts such as the Carpenters. Under the astute direction of long-serving company chairman Alan Hely, Festival quickly rose to become one of the top pop labels in Australasia (although the New Zealand operation was a standalone company with differing ownership and management), and through the late 1960s and early 1970s it rivalled and often surpassed the local market leader EMI. Hely built up a strong roster by cultivating Australian talent and establishing distribution deals with important local independent labels like Spin Records and Clarion Records in the 1960s and Mushroom Records in the 1970s. He also signed crucial distribution deals with major overseas labels like Island Records, Chrysalis Records, Arista Records and A&M Records which gave Festival exclusive Australian rights to a steady stream of international hit albums and singles. Festival played a major role in the Australian pop scene of the mid-to-late 1960s, and it competed strongly with its overseas-owned rivals EMI, CBS and RCA. Festival recorded or distributed some of the most popular Australian acts of the decade, including country music star Reg Lindsay. Lindsay received citations and awards from Festival management and the Australian Record Industry in the 1960s and 1970s for outstanding record sales and his promotion of country music nationally and internationally] the Delltones, Warren Williams, Billy Thorpe, the Bee Gees, Ray Brown & the Whispers, Tony Worsley & the Fabulous Blue Jays, Jimmy Little, Noeleen Batley, Mike Furber, Olivia Newton-John, the Dave Miller Set, Johnny Young, Jamie Redfern, Wild Cherries and Jeff St John. An important factor in the company's success during the pop boom of the 1960s was the pressing and distribution deals it made with the many small independent pop labels that emerged in this period. Notable among these were the Sunshine Records and Kommotion Records labels established by Ivan Dayman in 1964, Martin Clarke's Perth based Clarion Records and the Sydney-based pop label Spin Records, a partnership between publisher Clyde Packer and promoter Harry M Miller. A large proportion of the recordings released on Sunshine, Kommmotion and Spin were overseen by producer Pat Aulton, who became one of Festival's house producers from 1966 until the early 1970s. Aulton was probably responsible for more Australian-made hits than any other record producer of his era. Aulton began his career as a singer in the Adelaide band the Clefs, then became an A&R manager for the Sunshine label, where he produced many of that label's releases, including hits by Normie Rowe. When Dayman's mini-empire collapsed in 1966, Aulton discovered that he had unwittingly been named as a partner in the record label and this made him liable for its debts. As a result, he had most of his assets seized by creditors. He was rescued by Festival MD Fred Marks, who offered him a job as a house producer for Festival, overseeing all the pop side of the company's business. Aulton supervised the installation of Festival's new 4-track studio at Pyrmont later that year and he oversaw most of the company's pop/rock output between 1967 and 1970, including producing an album and an Australian hit single for American singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka. ==Growth and consolidation==