Honest Jon’s is a British independent record label created by musician Damon Albarn (Blur) and by various record shop owners. In the UK, it is a subsidiary of Parlophone.
Honest Jon’s also owns a record shop in Ladbroke Grove, London. It was founded before the label.
The label’s musical output includes compilations of funk, soul, folk and music from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. It has released calypso (including several volumes entitled London Is The Place For Me), soca (Lift Up Your Leg An Trample), Nigerian Afrobeat (Lagos Chop Up), British folk (Never The Same) and salsa (Boogaloo Pow Wow) as well as new recordings by Simone White, Elmore Judd, Candi Staton, Lobi Traore, Terry Hall and Mushtaq, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Tony Allen and Damon Albarn’s Mali Music.
Since 2008, Honest Jon’s has been releasing compilation albums featuring some of the 150,000 78-rpm recordings from around the world which are held in the temperature-controlled archive of the recording company EMI in Hayes, England. They include albums of African and Middle Eastern music.
Info extracted from Honest Jon’s (Facebook).
Photo: Google Maps.
Honest Jon’s
