Dandelion Records
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Dandelion Records was a British record label started in 1969 by the British DJ John Peel as a way to get the music he liked onto record. The record label Dandelion and its sister publishing company Biscuit were named after Peel's hamsters at the suggestion of his then flatmate Marc Bolan.
Around 28 albums were released by the label. One album was by the ageing Gene Vincent, with a cast of musicians including members of The Byrds and Steppenwolf. Others were by younger or non-commercial artists, including Beau, Bridget St John, Medicine Head, Clifford T. Ward, David Bedford, Lol Coxhill, Stackwaddy, Tractor, and Kevin Coyne/Siren.
The only record ever to make the UK charts was the single "(And the) Pictures in the Sky" by Medicine Head, which reached no. 21 in 1971. Beau's "1917 Revolution" made No. 1 in the Lebanon in 1969. Had Dandelion not turned down Roxy Music that same year, the story might well have been different.
Dandelion Records were distributed by, successively, CBS Records, Warner Bros. Records and Polydor. The label ran until 1973 when it started to try and place its artists with other labels as its distribution via Polydor had ceased. It had issued about a dozen singles and two dozen albums. Several releases attracted a cult audience but never quite crossed into the mainstream, although one of the last singles, Clifford T. Ward's 'Coathanger', from his debut album 'Singer Songwriter', attracted a certain amount of airplay on Radio 1.Both Tractor and Medicine Head appeared fairly high in various album charts- Medicine Head would go on to appear on Top of the Pops and Tractor would get heavily involved in the festival circuit. As Peel himself told Record Collector in 1994, 'when you can't afford full-page ads in the music press, artists become very resentful...there's no faster way of losing friends.'
One of the most curious albums issued by the label was a sampler, 'There Is Some Fun Going Forward'. The sleeve featured a photo of Peel in the bath with a naked (or at least visibly topless) woman.
Most Dandelion album recordings have been reissued on vinyl and/or CD, initially a batch of half a dozen came out on CD on Repertoire in the early 1990s, followed by the whole catalogue as two on one CDs by See For Miles Records in the mid 1990s. The Dandelion Records by Tractor and The Way We Live were reissued in the 2000s by Ozit Morpheus Records. As well as the Tractor CDs in current circulation on Ozit Morpheus, some of the Dandelion catalogue has now started to appear on Cherry Red Records
