National Health by National Health: in my opinion the crowning achievement of the Canterbury Scene and quite possibly my all-time #1 favourite album. It's a concise package of everything great about prog and a joy to hear every time.

I'm sure most here have already heard it (and in case you haven't, please waste no more time on my disturbed ramblings and go seek it out immediately!) but I want to talk about the year of its release: according to the ProgArchives database this is 1977, which always confused me. The liner notes to my CD copy of the album say that it was recorded in February and March 1977 and released a year later in February 1978. Both Wikipedia and RateYourMusic confirm this and Discogs lists no version of the album that came out earlier. Allmusic however does claim that it was released in 1977, and the original LP back cover says that the music was licensed in 1977 (with no other year being named on it). In polls and top 10 threads on this forum people usually file it under albums released in 1977 too; is that the year people remember it hitting the stores? Is the PA database wrong or am I deluding myself? It drives me mad that I can't seem to get a definitive answer to this.

Obviously in any thread users can then add "disturbed ramblings" that don't really help like confirming how great this album indeed is and how much they love it, there, I said it. Nice to give it a thread even though the thread wasn't meant for this.

To say something mildly constructive even if not really helpful, I suspect that in several places the "licensed" data as shown on the cover is used as major reference for the release year and then the album is put under this year in the database. This could explain your confusion (some used that, some used proper release data info), although I have no idea whether this is the ultimate explanation.

Oh, this is a typical cataloguing issue... I guess most internet databases only have one field for entering a date. So which one to choose: production, licensing, manufacturing (printing/pressing) or release date? Technically, and legally, these are all different things. A licensing date is the date when the contracts are signed between the authors/artists and the publisher (e.g. record company), this can intervene at the start, during or at the end of the production process. The manufacturing date is when the product goes to press/print (generally formalized by the contract between publisher and manufacturing company (printer), and what normally can not be done before the publisher has signed a contract with the artists. The release date is always the last in this process and is the moment when the product is put on the market.

Getting back to the internet databases, and my assumption that most have only one "date" field, it comes to what choice has been made regarding which date (production, print, release...) to enter. This choice should normally be clearly defined in the cataloguing rules of a database, but on internet things are rarely done with as much precision and cataloguers on a same database can follow different rules when/if they're not well instructed...

Since the release date can only be found on release charts and/or in the professional (music) press, and not on the product itself, I guess many databases rely on the year mentioned on the product, which is never the release date.

A professional archival database (for music, film, literature...) should have at least two date fields, and according to what we want to archive/register, maybe even more.

So, to cut a long story short (I should have started with that): I don't have the factual information regarding the National Health album, but I guess that the release date was February 1978, while the printing/press date - the one mentioned on the labels - was in (late) 1977. And the latter is officially still a different one than the licensing date, which normally is before things go to print...

Many words, in order to not even give you a clear answer...

http://www.calyx-canterbury.fr/nathealth/index.html" rel="nofollow - http://www.calyx-canterbury.fr/nathealth/index.html

It doesn't give the source for this date, but it has an incredible amount of specific dates, such as:

December 6, 1977 - London, St. Bartholomews Hospital (photo session for album front cover)

December 21, 1977 - London, Ronnie Scott's Club (photo session for album rear cover)

It looks like the author of the website is Aymeric Leroy who published a book back in 2016 under the title L'école de Canterbury.

MusicBrainz also has the same date, but source of date not given:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/8581eb55-f254-4825-b6f3-988b537156f4" rel="nofollow - https://musicbrainz.org/release/8581eb55-f254-4825-b6f3-988b537156f4

Rate Your Music originally had the date set as 1977 up through 2010, then an editor changed it to February 1978 on November 15, 2010 and gives the source thus:

"From booklet in the 2009 Esoteric records reissue of Of Queues And Cures: By the time the group came to record their debut album in March 1977, founder members, keyboardist Alan Gowen and singer Amanda Parsons had quit the group though they would return briefly as guest performers. Securing a deal with Charly Records' Affinity label, National Health was eventually released in February, 1978 receiving good press notices in the UK."

Scroll down to the November 15, 2010 entry at:  https://rateyourmusic.com/admin/corq/?album_id=30965" rel="nofollow - https://rateyourmusic.com/admin/corq/?album_id=30965

But yes, a lot of sites (some we would normally give a nod of credibility to) are bouncing between the 1977 and 1978 dates.

I wonder if there is a printed resource that gives dates of release that was published as a periodical back in the 1970s? I'm more familiar with dating books that lack dates and there are numerous printed reference sources that give this kind of information for books, depending on the country.

Both the sound recording copyright and copyright dates are 1977 on the back cover, but on the disc label it gives a sound recording copyright of 1978. It's no wonder this release has caused so much confusion.

I don't know the rules for copyright dates on sound recordings in the UK, but if they are anything like books, they can only ever be an estimate for a date of publication. It's also possible that the dates on the back cover were mistakes during the printing process.

In the U.S., they allow publishers to apply for a 2021 date in 2020 even when the book reaches market in late summer of 2020. So library catalogues in the U.S. usually put these dates in brackets because it's too much trouble figuring out when a book became available to the public. 

Since you are admin. can you get that changed in the PA archives? It is listed release as 1977, which is incorrect.

Thanks

The only time I care about recording dates over release dates is where something is released conspicuously out of alignment. Like when something recorded in 1970 but lost in the vaults is not released until 2000. In this instance using the release date is quite misleading.  But generally, I expect there to be a few months to a year between recording and release dates, so prefer to go by release date.

For the most part, I think people expect to see the release date, rather than the recording date when they look up an album on PA.

Actually, I should say year, rather than date, because dates are fairly meaningless given that different countries tended to have different release dates for many years. Which, of course means there have been occasional instances where an album was released late in one year in one country, and early in the next year in another. This could be seen as a good argument, of course, for using recording dates over release dates! 😜

Also consider that, even now, there are still a fair few albums that get a domestic release months, and sometimes a year or more, before an international release.

It’s a tricky one, for sure. So what matters most is consistency. But in a user-filled database like PA, consistency is very hard to attain, let alone maintain. There will always be albums that fall through the gaps.

I have to admit seeing a 1973 recording such as Necromandus having a release date of 1999, while it might be accurate, does grate a little to me. It’s great that the album was finally released after all that time, but calling it a 1999 album is a little disingenuous - and also in a way belittles it’s historical context (call me Pedro, but I have to agree with him that historical context does often matter).

sorry this was about dates but I lost track of time about 25 years ago..