Orlake Records

Orlake Records was a UK pressing plant established by plastics company Movilex Ltd. in 1964 and operated until 2007. By the late 80s, Orlake had built a reputation for "pressing the records that nobody else wanted to press", according to Peter Hall who was Orlake's General Manager before he returned to EMI as General Manager - Manufacturing. These records included picture discs, shaped discs, shaped picture discs, and coloured vinyl discs. The most famous of these is perhaps the withdrawn Erotica picture disc. Orlake operated a state-of-the-art plant with 16 Toolex Alpha automatic and 24 Toolex Alpha semi-automatic presses, at it's peak producing one million records per month. There was no in-house disc mastering or printing facility. In 1999, the plant was sold to First Sound And Vision Group (FSV) which went into administration on 6th November 2000. In 2001, Portal Space bought the plant, renaming it Orlake Vinyl Ltd., trading as Orlake Records. Due to a decline in demand for vinyl records, Portal Space closed the Orlake plant in summer 2007 and focused on their main plant which was renamed The Vinyl Factory. The plant was demolished in 2009. Orlake pressings are identifiable by hand-etched "Orlake", "OR" or, less frequently, "O" in the runout grooves. The + sign was also often used as joiner within the matrix numbers. For counterfeit releases of Orlake: Use Orlake (2)