I know very little about these except that they obviously all advertise the delights of the places they come from. The Montreal one looks like it set out to promote the city ahead of the Olympic Games being hosted there in 1976 and you can see that the reverse side of the Lanzarote and Amsterdam cards is to write home to your loved ones on. Being that the grooves are pressed into the card on a wafer-thin transparent flexi overlay the music on these discs is virtually unplayable and, as you can see from the photos, pressing music onto cardboard has the draw back of it bowing which make it impossible to play with the needle skipping.  As a bonus to the post I’ve added this Yugoslavian souvenir from the stalactite caves of Postojna released by the  tourist agency of Zagreb. The two records are 6″s and the slides are missing from this version. This is listed on Discogs in multiple versions with different covers and languages, I expect it was sold in the gift shop at the caves. Unfortunately none of the music or speech contained here is that interesting so I’ve not included sound files.

Earlier this year Jonny Trunk sat in for Jarvis Cocker on his BBC 6 Music Sunday Service show and in amongst the sonic delights he’d pulled from his collection was this little oddity. One of many ‘product flexi discs’ that can be found in record bins the world over. A vast number of services, brands and appliances were marketed to the public via flexi’s because they were a cheap gimmick that stood out more than your average magazine ad but could be added into one with little fuss. We’ve already had Kenny Everett advertising Pepsi, psych songs selling Smiths crisps and Arp and EMS plugging their latest wares.

Now comes a double sided, double entendre-laden oddity, released in 1964 by a London-based company called Ski-Plan. The first side is a cheesy look into how the other half live with two couples comparing notes on how much their ski holiday costs, “£37 odd for the fortnight”, “crikey! we reckon our basics for travel and hotel alone will be £40”. How times change. There’s a bit of padding with a speedy accordion interlude before an oh-so-jolly description of the holiday perks and activities, punctuated with a clumsy plug for the company before a final waltz off into the run out groove. “I think you must have been mad fishing out all that lolly!”.

It’s pretty pedestrian stuff but the gold lies on the second side which is the one Jonny aired. Narrated by Fenella Fielding – a British actress known for a whole host of roles and voice work in the 50s and 60s and named ‘England’s first lady of the double entendre’. I was most interested to learn that she voiced the Blue Voice on the BBC version of The Magic Roundabout‘s ‘Dougal & The Blue Cat’ which used to scare the living daylights out of me as a child with he cooing, “Blue is beautiful, blue is best…” line. She also starred in several of the Carry On… and Doctor In…’ films and her husky tones are perfect as she gets you to limber up for your ski-ing lesson with her mind seemingly on anything but.

When I first asked Jonny to submit something for the Flexibition at the start of the year he out did himself and send a whole folder of scans for consideration. The most obvious choice was the F. C. Judd Practical Electronics disc but I didn’t want all his hard work to go to waste so here are a selection of some of the other flexi’s he pulled out for your perusal.

http://www.allvinylexperience.com/Product_Flexis_-_The_Early_Years_-_1930s-60s.html

Mad magazine should need no introduction, its mascot, Alfred E. Newman (above: What – Me Worry?), has grinned greasily from its covers for decades now as the mag debuted in the early 1950s. They issued Specials which reprinted the best bits of the monthly mags and would contain posters, cards and sometimes sound sheets too, first on card and later on more traditional flexible plastic. Here are my collection, comprising over half the discs I’ve been able to find info on. My favourite has always been the one above with the strategically placed spindle hole where Alfred’s missing tooth is. The gags are of their time and some have dated better than others with the ‘It’s A Gas’ song probably best known among stoner or garage rock circles.

Some VERY of-its-time language on this one

‘Meet The Staff of MAD’ was the first sound sheet to be issued by the magazine, way back in 1959!

‘It’s a Gas’ was an early sound sheet, free with the magazine in the mid 1960s and also available on a regular 45 with a picture sleeves.

The Foo Fighters issued a flexi pressed onto card in 2014 that aped the layout of the MAD flexis above…
And here are some that I don’t have: The MAD Disco flexi had six songs on it – including a Disco version of ‘It’s A Gas’ – professionally played to perfectly ape the genre’s sound, unfortunately it was released in 1980, years after Disco’s peak.

‘Makin’Out’ is also late 70s, listen for the Star Wars and The Muppets references and pulsing Disco groove.

“It’s a Super-Spectacular Day” aka ‘The Mad Mystery Sound’ was included in a Summer 1980 issue of MAD magazine. The song has eight different unpleasant endings depending on where you drop the needle. You didn’t know which of the eight endings you’d hear when you played the song. MAD indeed.