THE JAPANESE DISCOGRAPHY
The Japanese red vinyl albums.
All the original Japanese albums manufactured by Odeon Records before 1971 (from "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" to "Meddle")were printed in Japan -as well as the traditional black vinyl editions- in a dark red colour edition ("low noise") carrying in some occasion a special limited edition white label. Some people say that the number of red vinyl copies produced is close to 500-600 each album but recent inquiries have revealed that the number must be larger than this, and we are talking of dozens of thousands of copies. Almost superfluous to say that for the collectors, these records take up the top of the "most wanted records" list.
The cover and the OBI (the famous Japanese paper stripe) are identical to the ordinary records and on the OBI there is no information about the red or black colour of the vinyl (some Japanese collectors assert that at that time records weren't sell sealed therefore was an easy matter to examine them before to buy).
Talking about the shade of the colour, the red vinyl appears intense, semitransparent, bright and pearly, almost ruby if viewed up to the light. These records are obviously very rare and in great demand by collectors, especially the older ones, which are usually estimated around $400-500 each, except "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and the legendary "Ummagumma", evaluated to more than $ 5.000!
It's however possible to find few of the Pink Floyd's
Japanese red albums at low figures: "Atom Heart Mother" and "Meddle" are two
relatively cheap and easy to find records.
Not a lot of people know the true story of the Japanese red vinyl. As a matter
of fact, for a long time, was unknown the reason why some copies were produced
in red. Many has been the conjectures about: some said that they were a limited
edition reprints, some that they were promotional records and so on.
An accurate inquiry carried out by our good friend Alessandro proves that there was a precise and easy to explain reason to justify the peculiar colour used from '60 to early '70 to produce many Japanese vinyls. In fact, besides Pink Floyd, some other famous bands had their records manufactured in red: The Beatles, The Grand Funk Railroad, The Beach Boys and more.
The choice wasn't a fortuitous event and it wasn't based on commercial reasons as it could seems, but it was dictated by merely technical needs. At that time, as a matter of fact, EMI Company (and consequently Toshiba, Apple and Odeon)had developed a specific technical patent called "EVER CLEAN RECORDS"©; its usefulness it's never been clearly understood but is quite probable that was a special vinyl paste with a high antistatic property (that's to say it does't attract dust). So this special material were used, and at the end of the manufacturing process, the vinyl turned to this dark/ruby-red, a colour very different from the ordinary red of many European and American records. It was therefore just an unintentional consequence of the materials mixture and not a colour picked out for aesthetic reasons. After all, if the purpose was to obtain just nice records, we probably would have green and yellow and rainbow coloured records and not only the same dark/ruby-red. This explains why some Japanese pieces, like "Atom Heart Mother", are items more easy to find in red vinyl rather than black; and it explains also why the only colour available on market is this unique shade of red (contrarily to some promotional or limited edition records like for instance the recent German production of "Wish you were here"). Almost the complete Beatles's discography from the sixties, as well as a large number of other bands but especially for the early Pink Floyd's records, were manufactured in black as well as red. Maybe the most peculiar thing to notice is that whereas the Beatles's red records are more common, the ones by Pink Floyd are, on the contrary, rare articles. The use of this materials mixture however, came to an end around 1971- 1972.
Another quite strange thing about Japanese ruby-red records, is that the Beatles's early red discs (before 1965) bore a Odeon's black label slightly different from the ones that followed: in the lower part, in fact, they show the inscription "LONG PLAYING" (right under the titles) with no mention of EMI at all.
Here is an example, a couple of Beatles's labels.
The record company.
Carrying on talking about curious details of the Japanese editions, the name of the record company printed on the back of the cover is for sure one thing that deserves consideration. The brand name "Toshiba Ongaku Kougyo" means nothing more than a partial translation of the EMI's trademark itself: "Ongaku" means "Music" and "Kougyou" means "Industry"; so you can read this "Toshiba Ongaku Kougyo" as "Toshiba EMI" (EMI is the abbreviation for "Electronic Music Industry"?.
Every single first edition of the Floyd's records was made by "Toshiba Ongaku Kougyo" (on label "Odeon Records"). The Japanese collectors usually use the abbreviation "On-Kou" that stands for the mark "T.O.K." printed on the back of the albums and sometimes on the OBI. The inscription represents ten small Japanese characters "kanji" usually printed under the catalog number which literally mean "TOSHIBA ONGAKU KOUGYOU KABUSHIRI G (K) AISHA" ("Kabushiri Aisha" means "corporation/company"). So, when you hear some Japanese collectors talking about a record using the abbreviation "On-Kou" it means that that record is a first edition.
As the years went by, the term "On-Kou" slightly
changed because the record company changed as well. And so we get at the "TOSHIBA
EMI" brand name, which can be seen in all the Floyd's recordings from the
seventies and lateron, getting finally to the recent years when Pink Floyd's
records were published under the CBS-SONY RECORDS label.
Promotional releases.
Almost every Japanese album has been preceded by
promotional special editions: these were black vinyl records identical to the
regular copies but distinct by a specific white label (always Odeon Records or
EMI-Toshiba) where often was printed a promotional inscription in Japanese
characters, consisting of three ideogram contained in a square frame. These
copies were certainly printed for a promotional campaign to precede the selling
of the original records but in many occasions they indeed appeared in shops
contemporaneously than the regular albums. That's the reason why there is great
demand for this rare items which obviously are not easy to find anymore, even if
(for the high price, often over $150) many collectors are "forced" to avoid them.
Rare as well are the promotional ruby-red records with white label, witch, of
course, can reach dreadful costs.
On the labels of this specific records is frequently easy to read, from the second half of the seventies, some strange information codes as "4/23" or "8/16". The meaning of this numbers, contrary to all that people asserting this is the number of the edition (for instance the 4th copy of 23 or the 8th out of 16) is indeed just the date of release, in these cases the 23rd of April and the 16th of August.
Rarest than promotional records are the "test-pressing" copies, which were printed and released before every other version. In the Japanese Pink Floyd's discography we can count just few test-pressing with a whole white label (the most famous and rare is "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" published in 1967, but interesting items are also "Atom Heart Mother" and "Animals", records that came out with covers identical to the subsequent editions.
From late seventies (in some case even earlier) and
throughout the eighties, in Japan (as well as in U.S.A. and some countries of
Europe) were produced another kind of special copies besides the white labeled
promotional editions, the "compilation records". These albums were destined to
disc-jockeys and contained tracks from different artists belonging all to the
same record company. Pink Floyd appears in few compilation, one for all the
well-known "All American Top 100" (CBS-Sony, XAAP-90011).
English translation by Patrizia Spinelli