Introduction

If you were around in the mid to late 1970s, and you enjoyed and indulged yourself in the popular music of that time, the chances were you owned a small piece of Casablanca Records' short but meteoric history.

Whether you were a fan of the new and exciting sound of disco, or preferred your sounds a bit heavier, or even got your kicks from country music or funk, it is likely that some of those old 45s you owned were the product of Casablanca Records.

The proliferation of Casablanca Records was such that even today, up and down the length of Britain, shops dealing in second hand vinyl, usually situated in the darkest and seediest corners of your local town, will still be selling 45s with that distinctive arched logo and the multitude of camels displayed luridly on their sleeves.

Don't expect to pay big money for these little gems, however. Depending on who the artist is, and the type of shop you buy it in (i.e. a junk shop or record shop), prices may range from 10p to £1.00. The more popular artists or songs will raise the asking price a bit more, but to give over a couple of quid for any of these 'singles' would be a folly - unless of course you are a rabid completist like myself and you simply MUST have that scratched/torn copy of The Captain & Tennille's "Do That To Me One More Time" which means you can finally fill in the blank that stood between the catalogue numbers of CAN 174 and CAN 176...
Anyway, I digress...

The UK 45rpm copy of Hard Luck Woman - and yes, it really was printed upside down.

As well as the company sleeves that were produced, there are also copies to be bought that come complete with a picture sleeve, though these nowadays are rarer to find and the price increases accordingly. A copy of the 7" single pictured above (KISS' Hard Luck Woman annoyingly printed upside down by the manufacturers) with its picture sleeve intact has been known to raise upwards of £30 at record fairs and the like. It would be nice, of course, to be able to get your hands on one of these at a record fair, but nothing can beat the buzz of finding something exciting in the racks of some poor unsuspecting soul's business. I recently bought a picture-sleeved copy of the Japanese Detroit Rock City 7" for £3, so it's good (and profitable!) to hunt around.

So, how did I get into such bizarre practices? Well, hands up, I'm a KISS fan. Throughout my teenage years I would hunt down flea-bitten second-hand record stores and search eagerly for any KISS singles I could get my hands on. It was easy to look for KISS, they had that Casablanca label with the camels and stuff. However, time and time again, everytime your heart jumped when you saw just the tops of these singles peeking out over the others in the box, you would have to compose yourself when yet again, it turned out to be a copy of Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff"...

The UK 45rpm copy of Donna Summer's live version of 'Heaven Knows' - designed by those folks who brought you the incredible UK KISS solo singles...

Bizarrely, though KISS' disco-rock single "I Was Made For Lovin' You" barely scraped into the UK Top 60, copies of the 45 proliferated and one can only assume that Casablanca and their British distributors, Pye Records, printed an awful lot of copies, fully expecting the single to be a smash. In the end though, it sank without trace. With the amount of copies swilling around the second-hand record stores today, it is possible that they've come via the 1979 bargain bins section rather than from the population's personal record collection. Yet, only months before, the UK market seemed ready for the KISS onslaught when Gene Simmons got his solo-single 'Radioactive' into the British Top 45.

However, it was a false dawn, and KISS would not crack the UK Top 40 singles chart until 1982, somewhat ironically with their final UK 7" release for Casablanca - "Creatures Of The Night". The UK, it seemed, finally came around to the KISS way of thinking. The teeny-bopper years were long gone, KISS now just wanted to be a straight rock band so it is a tip of the hat to the UK following that the fans, however few and far between in Britain, preffered to buy "Creatures Of The Night" over the super-commercial bubble-gum disco-pop of "I Was Made...".

However, it was too late. KISS was changing and the sans make-up period was a mere 2 more singles away... KISS had finally come out of the 'cult status' position they had secured since their controversial visit in 1976, but how would the band survive in a fickle market without the gimmick make-up?

Well, some will argue that KISS were all washed-up and old-hat by the early 80s, but in Britain at least, their most popular years, in terms of both media coverage and record sales, lay ahead.

However, that is a story 2 B told another time, another place. 4 now, I am concerned only with those years when KISS were snuggled in between Donna Summer and, er, Fanny, in those wonderfully over-the-top-excess-all-areas Casablanca years!

As for Casablanca Records under the Phonogram label in the UK, it had one last chart-topping hurrah (well, almost) with Irene Cara's excellent 'Flashdance' single in 1983, with the music being written by the seemingly ever-present hit-writing talent of Giorgio Moroder.

One of the last Casablanca singles in the UK.
The b-side featured the track "Love Theme From 'Flashdance' by Helen St. John...
'Love Theme'? 'St. John'? Now where have we heard these before?

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