There’s only one organization that can claim to have had Canada’s first independent record pressing plant…and that was the Compo Company Ltd of Lachine, Quebec.

Compo was founded in 1921 by Emile Berliner’s eldest son, Herbert after a family dispute saw him leave the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company of Canada (for an abridged history of Emile Berliner’s recording related inventions and accomplishments, see the RCA Victor section). Nobody knows why Herbert chose the name Compo, but it was certainly successful from the very first day it opened its doors.

Herbert was much more than simply another record executive sitting behind a desk. Herbert opened a recording studio and released several thousand Francophone recordings on Compo and various affiliated labels. For more than 50 years, Compo was the most active company in the Francophone market.

RCA Victor and Compo were the only two Canadian record companies to survive the financial crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression, although it required Compo to do several other things, including retooling the Lachine plant to press floor tiles.

Like Quality and Phonodisc, Compo relied on licensing recorded masters from U.S. companies. Their largest client (beginning in 1935) was Decca Records in the U.S. (for whom they were also pressing records for American distribution). That gave Compo exclusive Canadian rights to such best selling Decca stars as Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Guy Lombardo, The Andrews Sisters, The Ink Spots, Glen Gray and His Casa Loma Orchestra, Woody Herman and Bill Haley & The His Comets, the man many music historians credit with launching rock and roll to a mass audience in 1955 with their # 1 hit “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock”. Decca also had a large country artist roster which included Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Loretta, Lynn, The Wilburn Brothers and Patsy Cline. Later successful Decca pop recording artists included Brenda Lee and Burl Ives. The Brunswick and Coral labels were wholly owned subsidiaries of Decca. Buddy Holly and The Crickets along with Jackie Wilson were among the most popular performers for those labels.

But there were other American labels Compo distributed in Canada as well, including Cadence Records with top selling artists as The Everly Brothers, The Chordettes, Julius Larose and Andy Williams as well as Roulette Records, run by the controversial Morris Levy, who allegedly had close mob connections. Roulette was home to Ronnie Hawkins, Buddy Knox, Frankie Lymon and pop-folk singer Jimmie Rodgers.

United Artists was another Compo licensing deal. UA had Don Costa and His Orchestra, the popular piano duo, Ferrante & Teicher, guitarist Al Caiola and Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot.

Apex was Compo’s main label for releases in Canada with performers such as Billy Van, Pierre Lalonde and a Toronto based teenage pop group known as The Lords of London, who gave Apex a # 1 Canadian smash hit in 1967 with the song “Cornflakes and Ice Cream”. The song also went to # 1 in Boston, Georgia and Australia. Sebastian Agnello was a member of The Lords of London and he remembers that it wasn’t much fun being a 14 year old Canadian teen idol while still living with your parents “We rehearsed in the morning, went to school, had supper at 6 o’clock, then get driven to a gig and driven home again and that was the routine. My dad would get peeved ‘cause he’d be sitting on our veranda and a whole bunch of girls would come and stare at our house and he’d be like ‘Why are these girls staring at our house?’ Until he saw us on TV, with the girls screaming, and said “Oh gee, you’re on TV. He had no clue.”

While Compo had pressing facilities at their headquarters in Lachine, Quebec, its largest Canadian pressing plant/warehouse was in Cornwall, Ontario.

In 1961, Herbert Berliner was diagnosed with cancer and sold Compo to Decca in the U.S. As it turned out, it was a misdiagnosis and he didn’t have cancer after all. For the rest of his life, he bitterly regretted selling the company. Two years later in 1963, the Music Corporation of America (MCA) bought Decca and with it, went Compo. Herbert Berliner remained with Compo under the various new owners until his death in 1966.

Since then, the company was bought and sold several more times and is known today as the Universal Music Group.