Festival Records Contract Pressings
Outsourcing was also necessary for another reason. Although Beatles coloured vinyl had been pressed overseas as early as 1978, Australians would not see domestically pressed Beatles coloured vinyl until 1987.
Part of the delay stemmed from EMI (Australia)'s reluctance to invest in what it regarded as the "gimmick" of coloured vinyl. The company considered coloured pressings too noisy and potentially a compromise of its high-quality standards. So, when it decided in mid-1987 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with a limited red vinyl edition, it turned to the only local plant then with extensive experience in pressing coloured vinyl: Festival Records.
Festival Records was Australia's oldest and largest independent record label, having been formed in Sydney in October 1952. By the late 1970s, it had already been experimenting with 12-inch coloured vinyl and picture discs. At EMI (Australia)'s request, Festival pressed just over 9,000 copies of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on red vinyl, although early copies were closer to pink than red.
Warren Barnett, Festival Records' mastering engineer, created new half-speed masters for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band from the same 30ips tapes that Don Bartley had used for the 1983 Audiophile release.
Along with Sgt Pepper's, EMI (Australia) chose to go further into the coloured vinyl craze by following two months later with two other obvious Beatles titles, the The Beatles and Yellow Submarine, requesting 2,000 copies of each on white and yellow vinyl respectively.
Although the records were pressed by Festival Records, the masters for the coloured-vinyl editions of The Beatles and Yellow Submarine were cut at Homebush from digital tapes created from the existing analogue master tape copies. Please visit the dedicated album pages for more information.
All three releases were pressed with standard EMI labels and housed in standard EMI sleeves. A sticker stating "SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION IN COLOURED VINYL" was affixed to the front cover of each copy. Multiple sticker variations exist, with three of the more common examples being shown below.
Around July 2010, various coloured-vinyl and picture-disc copies of Abbey Road, purportedly pressed in Australia, began appearing on auction sites in reasonably large quantities. Abbey Road was never pressed in Australia on coloured vinyl or as a picture disc. All such pressings are fakes.
Variation 2: Sgt Pepper’s single + gatefold sleeves, July 1987
Variation 3: Sgt Pepper’s, The Beatles, Yellow Submarine, August 1987