British reggae label Fashion Records to relaunch

The back catalogue of the 80s/90s British reggae label, featuring Smiley Culture and Cutty Ranks, is to be reissued digitally for the first time.

Fashion Records was responsible for some of the UK’s biggest reggae hits in the 1980s including Smiley Culture’s Police Officer, Dee Sharp’s Let’s Dub It Up and Cutty Ranks The Stopper. The label was started in 1980 by John MacGillivray of Dub Vendor record shop, which sadly closed its physical store last year after the London riots, and Chris Lane who went on to run the label’s in-house recording studio, which was the source of many British reggae hits. Having been largely dormant since 2000, Fashion is now relaunching to enable their formidable catalogue to be reissued digitally. It’ll be the first time many of the tracks will have been available for many years. Chris Lane, who now drives a cab, has been working with digital distributer Believe Digital to digitalise countless DAT tapes of Fashion Records releases, with the first ten albums being released on Monday 19th March along with a best-of compilation titled ‘Fashion In Fine Style: Fashion Records Significant Hits Volume One’. News on which albums are to be reissued first when we have it. In the meantime, soak up Dee Sharp’s vibes below.