Festival Records (Australia)
| Festival (Mushroom) Records | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Parent company | Warner Music Group |
| Founded | 1952 |
| Founder | Paul Cullen |
| Status | Defunct |
| Distributor(s) |
Warner Bros. Records Rhino Entertainment |
| Genre | Pop, jazz |
| Country of origin | Australia |
| Location | Pyrmont, New South Wales |
Festival Records (later known as Festival Mushroom Records) was an Australian recording and publishing company founded in Sydney in 1952 and operated until 2005.
Festival was a wholly owned subsidiary of News Limited from 1961 to 2005, and the company was very successful for most of its fifty-year life, despite the fact that as much as 90% of its annual profit was regularly siphoned off by Rupert Murdoch to subsidise his other media ventures.
Festival was established by one of Australia's first merchant banking companies, Mainguard, founded by entrepreneur and former Australian army officer Paul Cullen. Mainguard had a wide range of investments including one of Australia's first supermarket companies, and a whaling business and also backed famed Australian filmmaker Charles Chauvel.
The origin of Festival was Mainguard's purchase and merging of two small Sydney businesses—a record pressing company, Microgroove Australia, one of the first Australian companies to produce discs in the new vinyl microgroove record format, and Casper Precision Engineering. After buying the two companies Cullen re-incorporated them as Festival Records on 21 October 1952; soon after he appointed popular Sydney bandleader Les Welch as the label's first artists and repertoire (A&R) manager. Another early staff member was Bruce Gyngell, who was later hired to help found Australia's first commercial TV station, TCN-9 in Sydney and was the first person to appear on TV in Australia in 1956. The connection between Nine and Festival would reap great benefits for the label in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Festival was able to gain a foothold in the Australian music market mainly thanks to Welch, who cannily acquired the Australian rights to the epoch-making Bill Haley record "Rock Around The Clock". The single had originally been turned down by the Australian division of EMI in 1954, when it was first released in the USA, but Welch was able to trump EMI and secure the Australian rights to the recording for Festival in 1955, after the song became a smash hit in America and Britain thanks to its inclusion in the film Blackboard Jungle. "Rock Around The Clock" went on to become the biggest-selling record ever released in Australia up to that time, and it established Festival as a significant emerging player in the popular music market.
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