Transatlantic Records: 1961–80

Transatlantic Records began with a trilogy of pseudonymous sex education records in 1961–62 – Dr Keith Cammeron’s Live with Love (catalogue numbers TRA 101, 102 and 103) – and ended in 1980 with the John Renbourn Group’s Enchanted Garden (TRA 356). It was conveniently symbolic – a last hurrah for 1970s folk-rock of a sort at the tail end of that era, before the machine-driven sounds of the 80s, and a record by John Renbourn, one of the label’s mainstays from the heady days of the mid-60s – someone whose oeuvre testified to Transatlantic’s eclecticism and adventure.

Three years before that, however, the label’s founder, Nathan ‘Nat’ Joseph (1939–2005), had
cannily sold it on. So if we calculate Nat’s departure as the spiritual end of Transatlantic, its last
hurrah becomes ‘The Floral Dance’ by the Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band (BIG 548) – a November
1977 No.2 hit single, more than a year after release. And that would also be a fitting end, a slab of
ebullient absurdity on the one hand but a celebration of a venerable British tradition on the other –
working-class brass band music from an institution founded in the nineteenth century, thriving in the
popular entertainment world of the modern age and a freak smash from a label hardly known for its
singles.

This combination of quirkiness, a regard for tradition, a sense of fun, a slight leaning to the left with
a hearty embrace of commercial opportunities and yet a tendency to release records by people who
might have struggled to get a deal elsewhere – many of them musically brilliant and, in the longer
term, culturally important – was all part of the Transatlantic ethos, if there was such a thing. Nat
himself might have nodded in recognition at those observations, but he would have denied it was
that thought-through: