Embassy Girls Volume 1: The Complete Recordings 1959-1962 - CD

Once dismissed as the 'poor relation' of 'proper' records, the vast catalogue of Woolworth's Embassy label has undergone serious and deserved reappraisal in recent years, among collectors of British 50s and 60s Pop. Jasmine has been doing it's bit to assist with this reappraisal in recent times, with both multi-artist sets and individual collections that have extensively featured the work of two Embassy mainstays in Maureen Evans and 'Hal Munro' (Neville Taylor). We have several more in the pipeline, too - and this month sees the release of a CD devoted entirely to the work of one of the label's longest-serving and most versatile artists. Jean Campbell recorded for Embassy from 1959 through to the label's demise in 1965. Like many of the label's singers, Jean had been a band singer for several years and was thus able to handle anything Embassy's A&R department handed to her to record, from hits by singers half her age to show tunes. This Jasmine collection pulls together everything Jean cut for Embassy under her own name (plus a couple of tracks where she was billed as 'Jean Scott') between 1959 and 1962. She was the label's main 'go-to' girl after Maureen Evans moved to the main Oriole label in 1960 and stopped recording covers for Embassy, and thus it was that she 'sung' everyone from Connie Francis to Helen Shapiro to Gracie Fields in the period that this collection embraces. Jean's career spanned more than 30 years and four decades in total, and she was popular on radio, TV and - thanks mostly to Embassy - on records, where her covers of the hits of the day frequently outsold the originals thanks to the vast network of Woolworth shops across the UK. It's a pleasure to pay tribute to a 'great unknown' via the first ever anthology - of ANY kind - of her great Embassy sides.