22 Aug '07 - 435 W - + 13 - 10 Flexipop! and the Cult of the Flexi Disc
Forget iPods and DVDs, for real honest-to-goodness nostalgic disposable pop records, there’s nothing to beat the flexi disc. Thin, transparent bits of plastic in a range of gaudy colours, one of these discs used to appear stuck to the cover of each month’s Flexipop! magazine back in the early ‘80s. I was a regular writer for Flexipop! in those days and I assumed that the discs, like my interviews, would be here today, gone tomorrow.
Not so. It turns out that both the magazine and the discs on its cover are now collectors’ items (ah, if only I’d saved more of them....!)
Recently, Stylus Magazine published an article all about the cult of the flexi-disc and they interviewed me as part of it.
Here's a snippet...
Besides its free flexi disc, the magazine—founded by a pair of ex-Record Mirror scribes, Barry Cain and Tim Lott—was notable for its rather impetuous approach to journalism. Collingbourne remembered a while-the-cats-are-away-type incident in 1982, where he and art editor Mark Manning (later to embark on a music career under the pseudonym Zodiac Mindwarp) turned a feature-and-photo spread on the Meteors into a Mad Max style cannibal holocaust. “The trouble was, the cover of the magazine showed clean-living kids Haircut 100,” Collingbourne said, “while the flexi disc was supposed to be mums’ favorites, Bucks Fizz. When the editors got back from holiday, they quickly realized the problems Mark and I had got them into, and replaced the Bucks Fizz disc with a Marc Almond one in the hope that would stop young kids or their mums from buying it.” The ensuing backlash garnered even more attention for the publication: a grandmother claimed the spread encouraged cannibalism among readers, which led to the issue being seized by police, and Flexipop! being banned by British newspaper and stationery distributor W H Smith.
Shit-stirring ledes and provocative layouts were all certainly bewitching, but it was the flexi discs that kept readers returning. “A really good flexi would make the magazine fly off the newsstands,” Collingbourne said, citing the popularity of the February of 1981 issue, which included a flexi of Adam and the Ants cutting a version of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A” named “A.N.T.S.”
Read the full article: Disposable Pop: A History Of The Flexi Disc.
Sadly, I can’t find a video of Adam and the Ants singing A.N.T.S. (in all probability, there isn’t one...) so here’s Kings Of The Wild Frontier instead...
Johnnie Depp, eat yer heart out!
