What, you may well ask, is this?
It looks and sounds like a single but wobbles and bends when you hold it. You can fold one inside a jacket pocket or tuck inside the pages of a book or magazine, and yet it still plays!
I now have over 250 of these waiting to reach the lucky readers of my forthcoming pop memoir Whatever Happened to the Teenage Dream? out this autumn.
As my story is set during the punk and new wave years of the late-1970s and early-1980s, I figured a coloured flexi disc like this would be both an original promotional tool and an interesting way of releasing music away from digital confines of Spotify and YouTube. A bit old school and of course you’ll need a record turntable to hear the tune, but authentic and true to those times.
Indeed, I have a handful of flexi discs in my own record collection which include the one handed to me in a queue outside the 100 Club in Oxford Street (Long Tall Shorty) and another I picked up at The Limelight in 1987 (Giant). Both were manufactured by Lyntone, the now defunct pressing plant based in Holloway, north London. As I recall, playing them wasn't always straightforward; you needed a coin or some sticky tape, or a combination of both, to get the perfect result.
The potential of flexi discs has been acknowledged by a number of artists over the years including The Beatles and ABBA.
Older readers may even remember Flexipop!, the short-lived 1980s music magazine that came with a free flexi disc. ‘Trashy, silly and unashamedly puerile’ later admitted its founders who had jumped ship from Record Mirror. More recently, there have been flexi disc releases by Foo Fighters, Panda Kid and Lizzo. I’m going to stick my neck out here. Flexi discs are back!
For a sneak preview of the flexi disc single by Who Shot Liberty? go to:
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