Castle Communications was a British independent record label and home video distributor founded in 1983 by Terry Shand, Cliff Dane, and Jon Beecher. Its video imprint was called Castle Vision. Castle Communications was acquired by American music distributor Alliance Entertainment in 1994 and subsequently by Sanctuary Records Group in 2000. The label was dissolved when Sanctuary became a Universal Music Group subsidiary in 2007, but later sold by Universal in 2012. Since 2013 Sanctuary has been owned by BMG Rights Management, with global distribution handled by Warner Music Group. (More from Wikipedia)
Unlike several other recent posts of mine where Allmusic really had almost nothing to contribute on the band that I was writing about, there is a long article about the Primitives by Bruce Eder – maybe the longest that I have seen on Allmusic for any of the UARB’s and UARA’s over the years. The opening remarks make it clear how great Eder thinks the band was:
“The Primitives were never, ever exactly a household name, even in Oxford, where they had a serious following as a club band – and that’s a reminder that some things in life and history, and even music, are just so unfair as to be unsettling. The Primitives [were] signed to Pye Records in 1964 [and] never found even a small national audience in England. . . . Castle Communications issued their catalog on CD in 2003. That CD was a delight and a vexation; it proved in the listening that these guys deserved a lot better than cult or footnote status, but it also brought home the unfairness inherent in their status. Even in their second, slightly more pop-oriented incarnation, when they were allowed to cut loose and be who and what they really were – a loud band without a lot of subtlety but power to spare and the sincerity to put over their music – they rated a place near the top of Pye Records’ roster and in the upper reaches of the British Invasion pantheon. Listening to the CD, this reviewer found himself pained, to the point of shedding a tear, over the fact that this band only got to leave 24 songs behind from its prime years. . . .
“[T]heir sound was very similar to the Pretty Things, rooted heavily in American R&B, and [lead singer Jay] Roberts was a serious, powerful shouter who could sound seriously, achingly raspy, rough, and growly, while the others played with virtually none of the niceties or delicacy that usually marred British attempts at the music.”
The 2003 CD on Castle called Maladjusted collects all or almost all of the songs by the Primitives plus some of Mal Ryder’s early recordings like “Forget It”. Besides the early singles on Pye Records mentioned already, there is an unreleased demo called “Oh Mary”, the entirety of the Italian album Blow Up, and a four-song EP that was released in France.
(May 2015)
