Our Story
The history of Campion Records, Rare Records Limited and Disc Imports Limited.
1950s Beginnings
The story of Campion Records goes back to the late 1950s. On leaving the army in 1947 following service in Italy and Germany during the Second World War my father Irving Wilson (1924-2017) became fed up with the jobs on offer back home in his native Manchester and decided to pursue his passion for music – particularly opera.
After first buying and trading collectable shellac discs and 78s he opened a store in Manchester city centre, which became Rare Records Limited. The business expanded and developed well with the growth of the long playing record industry, moving from the original premises to Barton Arcade on Deansgate.
Not content with just retailing, Irving started to import and wholesale records from Europe and Italy in particular where he developed a strong relationship with the Durium, Ricordi and CETRA (to become Fonit Cetra in 1957) labels. CETRA of course, had a huge catalogue of opera recordings with such great artists as Callas, Bergonzi, Tebaldi, Tagliavini.
He introduced the British public to lighter Italian singers such as Claudio Villa and Domenico Modugno. One local customer for the Callas recordings was Salford born artist L.S. Lowry who liked to paint and draw along to his favourite aria Casta Diva from Bellini’s Norma – Irving imported a total of eight sets of the CETRA Norma for Lowry, who to show his appreciation, gave him a drawing of a man plying a harp in Brighton.
Importing was expensive, so in the mid 1950s Irving bought two second-hand record presses from EMI and installed them in a rubber tire factory near Ashbourne in Derbyshire to press CETRA discs under licence. The first Campion Records release followed shortly in 1958 – a 45r.p.m. Extended Play called Shanty-O! A Nuatical Fantasy, performed by the Chetham’s Hospital Boys Choir (now the World famous Chetham’s School of Music), the recording engineer being one Charles Blyton, brother of children’s author Enid.
Inspiration for the label name was twofold – the sixteenth-century English composer, poet, and physician Thomas Campion, and the beautiful wildflower known as Red Campion, a favourite of my late fathers, which features on the original Campion Records logo.
Maria Callas, The Art of Callas LP 
Maria Callas, The Art of Callas LP. 
A man playing a harp, by L.S. Lowry, gifted to Irving Wilson from Lowry c1950s. 
CETRA Box Sets 
Shanty-O! A Nuatical Fantasy, the first Campion release in 1958. 
Shanty-O! A Nuatical Fantasy, the first Campion release in 1958. 
Christmas Carols, Cheetham Hospital Boys Choir, released 1958. 
Christmas Carols, Cheetham Hospital Boys Choir, released 1958.
1960s
To encompass the growth and expansion of the business into other music industry activities Irving established Disc Imports Ltd in 1965 followed by the move to larger premises at 36 John Dalton Street in 1966 where the business was to remain until 1980. Here Rare Records retail business was spread over three floors – the basement pop and rock department with five listening booths, the ground floor jazz, easy listening, folk, music from around the world and nostalgia, the first floor devoted to classical and spoken word.
The newly formed Disc Imports offices were on the second floor shared with admin for Rare Records. Always keen to explore the many diverse aspects of the music business, the next natural progression was into music publishing. In 1967 the first MIDEM festival was held at the Palais de Festival in Cannes – originally a publisher trade fair it became the music industry equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival. Attending his first MIDEM in 1969 MIDEM would prove a wonderful marketplace and Irving would eventually be a veteran attendee of over thirty years.
1970s
The decade of the 1970s would prove to be extremely fruitful and productive for Disc Imports. At the annual MIDEM held during the third week of January 1970, Irving met Franco and Luciana de Geminim owners of Beat Records in Rome. A couple of years previously Franco had been the inspiration for the character The Man with the Harmonica portrayed by Charles Bronson in Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon A Time In The West.
Old friends director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone built several scenes in the film around the harmonica playing of Franco and the film, of course, became a huge international success . Beat Records were the producers and publishers of soundtracks for numerous Italian and European co-production films with scores composed by the cream of the Italian film composers – Morricone, BrunoNicolai, Nino Rota, Francesco di Masi, Riz Ortolani – to exploit this wealth of music on the UK market Franco and Irving formed Eurobeat Limited in 1971. One of the most successful soundtracks from this period was for Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, which Irving licensed to EMI Records for UK release on their Classics for Pleasure imprint.
We would spend several family holidays travelling to Italy during the first half of the 1970s, loading up the family car with my mother driving all the way to Rome to visit the de Geminis, spending time at their Tuscan villa named Armonica, my older sister staying on to au pair for the Morricone family for a couple of months one year.
Irving also continued to make new classical recordings locally in Manchester with members of the Halle Orchestra using Indigo Studios – a recording facility associated with Manchester’s Granada Television.
The early 1970s saw Irving’s first visit to the USA as part of a UK music industry trade mission with representatives of the BBC and other independent publishers and producers. The USA would become a very important market for Disc Imports over the next decade with Irving making numerous visits to source recordings and also to sell homegrown music and recordings.
Disc Imports was now sourcing and providing music for broadcasters in both TV and radio – the BBC, Granada, Yorkshire TV, Anglia, Thames and the growing number of FM radio stations around the country. It was FM radio in the USA that would provide the next development in the Disc Imports story. The structure of US radio stations fell into a number of distinct categories such as AOR (Adult Orientated Rock) and the easy listening MOR Beautiful Music stations which depended on a stream of new orchestral or instrumental covers of popular hits of the day as well as older standards. A dispute with US Musicians over studio session rates and ever-increasing studio costs meant that this stream of new recordings had dried up by the mid 1970s.
As a result of this situation, my father was invited to produce orchestral recordings of the hits of the day to be syndicated to Beautiful Music stations across the USA and for use in background systems – in particular for MUZAK. From 1974 until 1980 several hundred recordings were produced at the legendary Strawberry Studios in Stockport – home of 10CC, drawing on a pool of musicians from the Halle and BBC Northern Orchestra. Other close collaborations were established with the Authors Agency which was the state publishing and recording house of Poland and also Supraphon and Opus in Czechoslavakia.
Irving made numerous visits to Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava and Brno, which were all firmly behind the Iron Curtain at this time, to negotiate & supervise recording sessions. Apart from attending a number of recording sessions at Indigo, Pluto, Arrow and Strawberry studios during this period I had also spent my summer and Christmas holidays assisting in Rare Records since 1975 but on leaving college in 1977 I joined the business full time. My first role was learning to use the Revox and Tascam 10″ reel to reel tape recorders to produce copy masters, demo tapes, splicing and editing production masters for our customers. Manchester at this time was second to London in the vanguard of the Punk and post Punk movement – which I greatly enjoyed and became involved in a small way.
A local band The Distractions were garnering quite a following and critical acclaim so I became their recording manager producing four tracks at Cargo Studio in July 1978 when I was still 18 which were destined to become their first commercial release on Campion. However, this was not to be at the time but the band has continued to have a cult following and almost 42 years later the four tracks were finally given a release in March 2020 on a two-CD compilation of all their recordings.
1980s
The dawn of the new decade saw a move out of the centre of Manchester to the prosperous town of Wilmslow in Cheshire around 11 miles south of Manchester city centre. Rare Records occupied the ground floor of the new premises with Disc Imports offices on the second and admin on the third. It was early in the 1980s that Irving switched recording production for the US market from Strawberry to CTS in London using what was the BBC Midland Radio Orchestra renamed as the Midland Radio Light Orchestra.
With the switch Irving had a fortuitous meeting with composer, arranger, orchestrator and the Midland Radio Orchestra principal conductor at the time Nicholas Ingman – a meeting that would result in many fine compositions, arrangements and recordings to add to the Disc Imports and Campion Records catalogue. Nick started his career as assistant/arranger to Norrie Paramour house producer at EMI and he has gone on to compose TV and film music, arrange and work with many well known artists as diverse as Placido Domingo, Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson, Robbie Williams, Sir Paul McCartney & Elton John.
Working for so long supplying music for synchronisation in television and film Irving had steadily built up a catalogue of original new compositions and arrangements into what would become the D I Library catalogue but he also had a hankering to return to commercial record production and it was the combination of two great sea changes in the history of musical recordings that enabled this.
Firstly, the advent of digital recording technology and by the mid-1980s CTS had become the World’s first studio to be fully digital, and secondly, the launch of Compact Discs in 1982 as the music carrier that would dominate the market for the next three decades. Over the next few years, Irving commissioned Nick Ingman to make arrangements of works by Albeniz, Dvorak and tunes from The Beggar’s Opera plus some original compositions – recordings of some of these works were made in Prague and were included in the first batch of CD releases on the newly revived Campion Records.
In 1988 Campion was the first label to release music by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar. Introduced to his music back in the 1970s whilst working with the Authors Agency we had already worked successfully with master tape recordings of his compositions and those of his compatriot Maciej Malecki. New digital recordings of a selection of his and Malecki’s scores from domestic Polish and European films were made in Prague to be released on RRCD1303 the third Campion CD Sound Tracks – Nick Ingman contributed a wonderful composition Rosebud as a homage to his favourite film the Orson Welles classic Citizen Caine. Kilar of course went on to be a highly in-demand film score composer for the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski.
1990s
With the re-launch of Campion Records as a commercial platform for our recordings and publishing Disc Imports also returned to becoming a distributor and importer/exporter again. Whilst negotiating distribution agreements for overseas territories for Campion we were being offered distributions rights for many European and US classical labels for the UK market so built up quite a roster of imported labels to promote. The imported distributed labels were marketed to the retail trade countrywide alongside our Campion releases and through Rare Records which had a long established mail order service.
The late ’80s and through the 1990s were very much a golden age for the growth of classical CD sales following the huge commercial success of recordings such as The Three Tenors, Nigel Kennedy’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and the launch of ClassicFM in 1992 which would play an important role in the Campion Records story during 1995. The ethos of Campion had always been to promote recordings of compositions and works published by one or other of Disc Imports publishing names or world premiere performances of new or neglected works but this changed at the January 1995 MIDEM when we held a meeting with a studio owner and producer from Riga, Latvia. At this meeting we were presented with a vocal recital recording, mainly of popular opera arias but with a few sacred songs, amongst which was an arrangement of a little-known composition by Italian Baroque composer Giulio Caccini.
As an opera buff since his youth, on hearing the voice of Inessa Galante Irving recognized it to be something special. Furthermore, the arrangement of the Caccini Ave Maria by Georg Brinums was hauntingly beautiful and he knew would become a sensation if we could obtain the rights to promote the recording. On returning to our office following a successful MIDEM contracts were negotiated and Irving flew to Riga shortly after to meet with Inessa Galante who had learnt her craft on the stages of the Kirov and the Bolshoi to arrange further recording sessions. By May of 1995 RRCD1335 Debut was released and we were busy circulating promotional copies to radio, newspapers and magazines and to our overseas distribution partners.
Very quickly the Caccini became the standout track with broadcasters and ClassicFM in particular, where it featured heavily on their playlist to become a ‘classical hit’. The Debut CD, Inessa and the Caccini went from strength to strength – we assisted in appointing a UK agent for Inessa who arranged concerts and operatic engagements around the country. During the following months, our overseas distributors also experienced great success with ever-increasing sales of Debut – Australia, USA (where it topped the Tower Classical charts), South Korea, Germany, France, Scandanavia and The Netherlands.
A chance broadcast on a prime-time Dutch TV show propelled Inessaand the Caccini to even further heights culminating in the presentation of gold and platinum awards for sales in The Netherlands, presented to Inessa by Bond villain actor Jerome Krabbe.
Now that we had firmly established Inessa’sperformance of the Georg Brinums arrangement of the Caccini Ave Maria in the repertoire we were inundated with requests for the sheet music. In 1997 we were approached by BMG Conifer to hire the score and parts for a forthcoming recording session for Lesley Garrett. We supplied the materials but however, the Brinums arrangement did not suit Lesley Garrett’s voice so we commissioned Nick Ingman to make a new arrangement in A minor for flute, oboe, organ and strings – it was this version that appeared on A Soprano Inspired.
Shortly after the Garrett CD had been released SONY Music contacted us to hire score and parts of the Caccini/Ingman Ave Maria for a forthcoming recording project with a twelve year old soprano – this would turn out to be the debut CD by Charlotte Church Voice of an Angel – which would go on to be a worldwide multi-million selling album. Recording sessions in Riga produced further Inessa Galante CD releases for Campion and whilst searching the archives at Radio Latvia for broadcast performances Irving discovered a wealth of recordings of works by Latvian Nationalist composer Janis Ivanovs (1906-1983). Ivanovs was little known and largely unpublished in the West so we embarked on a project to bring his works to a larger audience.
During 1997 we established a new label imprint Campion Cameo for recordings and projects that didn’t necessarily sit on the Campion Records label and it would be this new label that I would take into the noughties to develop in a different direction.
Now in his early 70s and having success around the world with Inessa Galante and Campion Records, launched Campion Cameo to promote the compositions of Ivanovs and other Latvian artists and composer, concluding a deal for the representation of the D.I. Library catalogue with Parry Music in the USA and with many hundreds of titles actively published Irving decided it was time to step back a little from the business.
Time to pursue his passion for travel and opera, particularly frequent visits to Italy, Vienna, Berlin and attending performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Bayreuth. Getting towards the end of the lease on the Wilmslow premises in 1998 presented opportunities for a move closer to my home in south Manchester and a change of direction – splitting my time between Rare Records retail business, distribution of our imported labels & developing Campion and Campion Cameo was becoming too much.
I took the decision to sell the assets of Rare Records to the owner of an established bookshop in Wilmslow to give continuity of the Rare Records name but retained ownership of the Limited Company.
Disc Imports would move to new offices in Cheadle in August 1998 with Irving acting as consultant and Chairman. To end the decade I was executive producer of a new recording of Baroque songs and arias by Inessa Galante to be recorded in London during July 1999, followed by Inessa’s debut recital at the prestigious Wigmore Hall, with a simultaneous broadcast by BBC Radio 3.
2000 Onwards
It was our initial intention to produce a complete series of releases of the Ivanovs 21 Symphonies and his numerous concerti and orchestral works. After getting off to a good start unfortunately we discovered that many of the recordings from the Latvian archives were not suitable for release as the master tapes had deteriorated beyond repair. We managed to release six volumes in total then with great regret we had to put the project on hold. I had been approached by producer Philip Lane who asked if Campion Records would be a home for a recording he had made of British music for piano duet – I concluded a license and we release RRCD1353 British Music for Piano Duet in 2000. Philip would offer me other recording projects over the next few years so I established the British Composer Series on Campion Cameo as a home for these recordings. The first release in 2002 was a collection of orchestral works by Cumbrian composer Matthew Curtis.
Matthew is a wonderfully melodic composer and Campion Cameo have issued five volumes of his orchestral works to date alongside a collection of his chamber compositions. These recordings also introduced me to Gavin Sutherland, principal conductor of the Royal Ballet Sinfonia who feature on many of the orchestral recordings issued by Campion Cameo – collections of works by Bill Worland, Paul Lewis (prolific composer of TV, film and library music), Peter Cork (Dudley Moore’s piano teacher) and Christopher Irvin. As a pianist Gavin has recorded two volumes of British music for piano and clarinet with Verity Butler and three volumes of his highly entertaining ‘party’ pieces where he improvises on show songs and popular standards from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Recorder player John Turner brought a number of interesting recording projects to the British Composer Series and an encounter with composer, pianist and engineer Steve Plews also resulted in further recordings added to the series – in all Campion Cameo has over 45 CDs of World Premiere recordings by over 45 twentieth-century British composers. Although the pace of releases slowed from 2010 Disc Imports was still very active in the distribution of imported labels, but with a downturn in classical music sales, closure of many classical and general music retail stores I finally decided to wind down the distribution side of the business from 2014.
Parry Music, our partners for the D.I. Library catalogue of published works and recordings, had decided to retire and negotiated the sale of their business to BMG – this was an extremely beneficial move as BMG digitised the complete catalogue and made it available worldwide. After over 40 years in the business, I took a sabbatical for a couple of years and moved from the Cheadle offices to my new home on the Lancashire coast at Lytham St. Annes. I am now delighted to present this CampionRecords.co.uk website as a tribute to my late father Irving Wilson and also as a document to the history of Campion Records.
Alan Wilson
Updated January 2021
