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2009

As time goes by, so more friends die. This year saw the deaths of two people very close to Ace - not just on a professional level but even more on a personal one.

Ray Topping died in January, after a long and cruel illness. His emotional connection to vernacular American music could spill over and make him difficult, but his engagement could never be denied. Rarely has anyone pursued a passion with such singularity. That passion was indelibly stamped on Ace Records, running through the company like lettering through a stick of rock. It was Ray who introduced us to the vast wealth of the Modern catalogue and compiled it in depth across LP and CD, a body of work that is his enduring legacy. But he also worked on Starday, Ace US, Combo, Specialty, Duke / Peacock. He put together two fabulous albums of “Jump Blues” from US Decca, one of Old Town blues sides, an Atlantic set that rocked from top to bottom and so, so many others. He had a keen ear for music, matching enthusiasm and boundless interest in his subject to which he brought a great intelligence. Bless him.

There weren’t many early Northern Soul venues that didn’t feature artists from the legendary Mirwood label, so it was joy to discover in 2004 that Ace had purchased the Mirwood and Mira labels, resulting in Jackie Lee’s ‘The Duck’ getting a fresh, digitalised outing on “The Mirwood Story Volume 2” along with Jimmy Conwell’s “Cigarette Ashes” and Mine Exclusively” by the Olympics. Both Lee and the Olympics also got their own solo sets on Kent along with an Afro-Blues Quintet Plus 1 release on Beat Goes Public.

(For the Ace History Year-by-Year click here).

Leonard Chess started with the Macomba Lounge, the Bihari brothers started with a Los Angeles eaterie and Ted Carroll began with a market stall decorated with Elvis Presley wallpaper. Each would go on to form record empires that would help change the face of popular music. 

Tell us about your background in design and how your got started.

My father was in 'the print' and worked as a compositor all his life - I remember visiting him at work from an early age (I still love the smell of letterpress ink in the morning) and watching him setting a page, and being taken round the plant and seeing the presses running.

I never really intended to do anything remotely similar but was reminded, years later, by her, of a conversation I'd had with my nan when I was 12 or 13 and she'd asked me what I wanted to do when I finished school/college and I'd replied 'be a commercial artist' - I'd really little idea of what one was or did at that point.

I swapped my stamp collection with a friend’s older brother for the beginnings of a record collection about the same time, and that was it. I knew I'd have to work in the music industry somehow.

I left college with a degree in Humanities with that aim and spent a year writing music reviews for the Bristol student newspaper, as a first step towards the NME/ZigZag or similar. The editor's principal requirement for the job was that you were prepared to do it all - source the albums/gigs to review, write the review, have it typeset and then lay out the page/s in each issue ready for the print process. In at the deep end.

Back to London to a job in the production department of a small publishing company (music journalism just seemed to drain my enjoyment once it became 'a job') - some writing, but far more marking up type and laying out pages… design, in fact. After a couple of years of dues paying and on-the-job learning I thought - 'I can do this now and maybe I'm a designer and maybe I know a little about type and should work for myself.' My father wasn't sure about the type thing though - commenting on a piece of work I showed him at the time that it was ‘good, but it's photo-setting, not proper type!’

Skipping over a couple of decades of mostly independent work and what I hope is largely good design (with some lamentable stuff along the way of course - I'm thinking of the 80s here) - I've managed to combine my love of music with something like a 'proper job' and find myself here, watching with amusement as my son attempts to manoeuvre away from the inevitable time when he finds himself in a job involving design/typography/print.

It’s a bitterly cold February ‘94 and I’m in New York City attempting to persuade Tony Middleton to come to Cleethorpes, one of north east Lincolnshire’s premier hot spots, to sing to his UK fans at our inaugural Northern Soul weekender. While I’m there I decide to pop in on Paul Williams, an old friend who used to buy Jackie Moore imports off me in 1974 when I was a West End barrow boy. He had worked his way up in the music business and was then a Vice President at the mighty RCA Records situated on 1540 Broadway, NYC.