Horrible

"Lock the doors, buy your pair of earplugs and run for cover. For now, without any pretense we have the Horrible Record Co. (an honest-to-goodness firm) which has just released its first disk. The Horrible Record Company makes no bones about it. Its records are just terrible. And its slogan is “If it’s really a horrible record, it’s bound to be a smash”. It started this way: Two professional songwriters named Tony Burrello and Tom Murray wrote 26 songs between the summer of 1952 and March of 1953, but none of them went anywhere. Then one day in March they were listening to a disk jockey program and the man in charge said that the top record hits he was playing were “the worst songs I’ve heard in all my years in the business”. Right then and there Burrello and Murray formed the Horrible Record Company and during the next 17 minutes they wrote the words and music of their first two sides “Fish” and “There’s A New Sound”. The boys, in an attempt to live up to their firm’s name, tried to get everything as horrible as human ingenuity could make it. They wrote the lyric to “Fish” in four minutes. And to insure a spectacular performance from their vocalist. Leonna Anderson, they refrained from letting her see or hear the number until six minutes before they were ready to record it. The results of that strategy are evident in Miss Anderson’s performance from the very first note she sings." - Cashbox, May 23, 1953, page 18.