1969–1982
The roster later included British jazz and folk. Some of the more progressive jazz musicians of the late 1960s were released under the Deram imprint, including Mike Gibbs, John Surman, and Mike Westbrook. Deram albums bore a DML prefix for mono and an SML prefix for stereo releases. As with other UK Decca subsidiary labels, Deram's U.S. counterpart was distributed under London Records. Decca positioned it against Island Records, Harvest Records (started by EMI), and Vertigo Records (started by Philips Records), but it failed to compete.[4] An 'extra' progressive series with SDL prefixes did not improve the situation.
From the start, Decca placed pop records next to progressive artists on Deram. Cat Stevens found early success there before moving to Island Records, and David Bowie's first album appeared on the label.[4] Three of Deram's earliest hits, Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and the Move's "Night of Fear" and "I Can Hear the Grass Grow", were produced outside the company by artists not directly signed to Deram.[4] They were part of a deal with Straight Ahead Productions, who later moved their acts to EMI and had them released on the re-introduced Regal Zonophone imprint.
In 1969, Decca launched Nova, a progressive label that lasted less than a year. This caused further confusion as simultaneous releases on Deram Nova and Decca Nova appeared. Decca released Justin Hayward's Songwriter (1977) and Night Flight (1980) vinyl albums on Deram. In 1980, Sir Edward Lewis sold Decca to PolyGram, which put its new acquisition under the control of Roger Ames.[5] Even though the label name was briefly used in the early 1980s for records by Bananarama, the Mo-dettes, and Splodgenessabounds,[4] Ames decided to focus on Decca (for classical music) and London Recordings (for pop music), with London run as his own 'semi-autonomous indie' from within the major. From this point Deram was used as a reissue imprint for other recordings in the Decca/London catalogue and was eventually sold to Universal/UMG as part of Decca Records (London went with Ames to WMG, who sold it to French indie Because Music in 2017)[6]
