Lido Records

Lido Records was a first-floor office on Marine Parade in Southend-on-Sea, directly above an amusement arcade, and the bass from the cabinets downstairs came up through the carpet all summer. Vic Danvers, who ran it, said this saved him hiring a drummer.

He had been booking the coast for twenty-two years before he pressed anything — summer season, end of pier, cabaret rooms, talent nights from Clacton down to Margate. If you needed six weeks of Thursdays filled in 1974, you rang Vic. He started the label in 1981 because holidaymakers kept asking the acts where they could buy the record, and there was no record.

The letterhead gave an address on Wardour Street. It was a mail-forwarding service costing eleven pounds a month. Vic never mentioned this to anyone outside the building and never pretended otherwise inside it. He had spent his whole working life understanding precisely what a thing was worth to the person buying it, and a London postcode was worth eleven pounds a month.

What Lido believed, insofar as a label of four people believed anything: that a working act beats a promising one; that if you can't hum it by the second chorus it isn't finished; that you pay the session player on the day, in cash, and he comes back; and that aspiration is not a joke. People save all year for a fortnight. You do not sneer at what they saved for. Nobody who worked there ever put a record out with their fingers crossed behind their back.

It sold organ music at Christmas, which paid for everything. It signed a soul-boy act that broke up over a van. In the summer of 1985 it had a number six, fourteen weeks on the chart, two appearances on television, and licensing deals in four countries — and for about five months Lido Records was, on paper, a real record company. Vic spent the money on promoting three more acts, which was the correct decision, and none of them landed, which was arithmetic rather than judgement.

He sold the catalogue in 1987 and went back to booking, by all accounts with some relief. The imprint has existed since then as a line on a licensing spreadsheet, which is a quieter kind of existing but is not nothing.

Vic Danvers died in 2011. The funeral was well attended by people who had been paid on the day.