Intro

Between 1978 and 1980 I  changed career five times.

Okay, they all involved music, but they were all very different. With two of them I had to constantly sell myself and that particular skill wasn’t in my repertoire. It used to be. Up until the age of twelve I was awash with confidence, but it was the perishable confidence of an only child accustomed to being the centre of attention and eager to please.

I became a member of a local drama group and acted in productions at Finsbury Town Hall and wrote and starred in plays that were acted out at my junior school. I was an oik from Oiksville but I knew how to turn a card.

So in my first year at Owen’s, an all-boys’ secondary school in Islington, I thought nothing of raiding my mum’s wardrobe and dressing up as Megan Davies – the girl bassist in the Applejacks – and performing ‘Tell Me When’ in a miming competition (we were beaten by the Four Pennies with ‘Juliet’).

I was very competitive.

That was quickly followed by a magic show I presented in front of the whole school at that first Christmas concert. I even had the temerity to sing solo in the choir at the carol service the following day.

Grave mistakes, all.

I got away with it that year – eleven and twelve-year-olds back then were still standing in the shadows of tooth fairies – but after we were streamed I found myself in a form surrounded by some B- movie bastards. Life was no longer about classrooms lined with splodgy self-portraits, pine cones and home-grown plants all swaying gently to the sound of a hamster on a wheel.  Now it was shit and piss and impromptu hard-ons and ignominy.

The Megan incident was recalled one dark day about four weeks into the new school year. And so began eight consecutive terms of warp-factor-six intimidation.

First they dubbed me Sheila after someone mistakenly thought that was the name of the Applejacks girl. That was replaced by ‘Worms’ because my hair was excessively straight and greasy. Kids would stick used pieces of chewing gum onto my scalp because they were ‘Wrigleys’ (quite witty actually − well, it was a grammar school). I could only get them out by slicing off chunks of hair with a penknife I carried purely for that purpose.

This was something I couldn’t beat − there were just too many persecutors. It was my school nightmare and it didn’t help that 90 per cent of them were more intelligent than me. Outside the classroom with the guys on my estate it was different. There, you knew where you were, you knew what you were.  None of them had a glimpse of my nightmare and they were my best friends. 

At primary school nobody really got into major fights, apart from the odd bully boy, one of whom pulled a knife on me during morning break when I was six. I had a few street fights − it was unavoidable. As an eight year-old I once had to defend myself from serious injury with a dustbin lid when a mad Greek Cypriot kid, who later went on to gain notoriety as a mercenary in Angola (where he was executed) under the name of Colonel Callan,  tried to stab me with a sharpened broom handle.

A year or so later three members of a rival gang − two heavies and one lunatic – dragged me into an alley and cut off the soles of my shoes with carving knives. Did ever you see such a thing in your life?

Those were the days.

But I’d never before experienced the violence I endured at grammar school because it wasn’t physical. The thirteen and fourteen year-old boys who surrounded me in class tortured with their words. Forget that sticks-and-stones shit. Names hurled relentlessly for nearly three years hurt more.

I tried to compensate by acting a bit spivvy – bunking off, working on a pet stall in Chapel Market in the Angel, Islington, shouting, ‘Two quid the dog, thirty bob the bitch,’ as I walked up and down with a puppy under each arm. But it was all to no avail.

But, thanks to the Beatles, a trendy haircut and a handmade three-piece suit, this worm eventually turned.

Just before my thirteenth birthday we moved from a one bedroom council flat in Kings Cross to a two-bedroom council flat in King’s Cross, and the first thing I got for my bedroom was a record player. I bought it at Headquarters & General Supplies in Oxford Street and it cost a tenner. At the same time I bought my first single – ‘Baby Let Me Take You Home’ by the Animals, followed a week later by my first album – ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.

It had to be the Beatles. They were like gods to me and I’ve never felt like that about anyone before or since. Each album was an introduction to another phase of my life and the deeper the albums became, the less they needed to release.

From ‘63 to the middle of ‘65, The Beatles brought out five albums full of six-month songs. During those years I was down at the end of lonely street with a barnet full of Wrigleys and I needed those quick fixes. Then they released the one sided album Help and the fixes were cut with talc leaving me gasping for more. The lyrics were the problem. With a couple of exceptions, they were nothing more than flash Bobby Vee.

I started to panic.

With the Beatles I could just about cope. But what if they were just another Gerry & the Pacemakers? What if their juice had coagulated in my veins and didn’t flow anymore?     

My soul was leaking. I needed a rubber one, quick.

They delivered, being the gods they were, with a bunch of songs that took the ribbon from my hair and helped me make it through the night. For the very first time, I could actually identify with the words. They made me feel more grown up, able to embrace the jibes and join the tribes.

Rubber Soul made things cool. It was December 1965. But there was still a long way to go for them, and for me.

Revolver, released in the summer of ’66, was the last of the ‘six monthers’. Sgt Pepper came out almost a year later and the extra wait coupled with the album’s madcap songs kinda tripped me into adolescent maturity. To celebrate, I got a haircut to suit the times – smart skinhead. It freed the worms and freed my mind. People stopped taking the piss and even girls started to notice me, well, the ones with glasses and a slight limp.

I was fifteen when my dad took me to Alfie Myer’s tailoring shop in Old Street to be fitted with my first suit – dark blue three-ply mohair, single ten-inch vent, fifteen inch bottoms with turn-ups, narrow lapels, waistcoat for those more ostentatious moments in life. Four fittings and one month later, I collected the thirty quid golden fleece and wore it for the first time at the Boathouse Club by Kew Bridge with the white button-down tapered Ben Sherman, college tie, white silk handkerchief peeking out the top pocket, fob watch gleaming from the waistcoat and shimmering classical black brogues. I danced to the Equals and Marvin Gaye and felt like a million dollars.

Incidentally, that night I was attacked by about ten mohair-suited skinheads, the worst kind, as I walked over the bridge to catch a bus. I escaped a beating − I had the gift of the gab back then − but the-ten-inch vent turned into an eighteen-inch vent during the initial chase when someone grabbed hold of my jacket.

I grew up overnight. It happens.

The limbs of my confidence had been blown off on a D-Day beach. But, thanks to the Beatles, Stanley Kaye’s barbershop off Liverpool Road and Alfie Myers, I still had my knob. Just.

I don’t remember meeting Stanley Kaye, or Alfie Myers. But I did meet Paul McCartney once, probably the most Megan-tragic meeting of my life...

It was like this...

 

© Barry Cain 2013

As promised, here’s the beginning of the sequel   to ’77 Sulphate Strip…

 

Tell Me When

by

Barry Cain

 

A start  

My life has been full of Megan moments.        

Take the other night. I’m at a reception for a cruise company held in a sumptuous members’ only club deep in the heart of Mayfair where toilet attendants are mandatory. I’m holding a glass of pink champagne, my third, and frequently swallowing exotic canapés distributed by red-jacketed waiters of various nationalities.

Around me – journalists, PRs, cruise executives, hip-hop-hippity-hop. It’s the same old song but it’s comfortable and the faces are familiar. I’m there in my capacity as editor of Cruise Trade News, a glossy magazine for travel agents and the industry. I started the title ten years ago and although it never paid the rent, the perks – free cruises – are edge of heaven and worth the odd minor sacrifice like no income.

So I’m chatting to a couple of real cutie-pies, sharp and blonde and charming, when the presentation begins and I head for a tall side-table where I can put my drink down, stand and take notes. A voice ushers the room to silence and the MD begins his speech.

A few minutes in I accidentally knock my glass over, sending its entire contents flying across the table and over another journalist’s notepad. The glass falls to the floor and explodes into a million pieces. The MD pauses while every face in the room turns and looks at me.

‘Sorry.’ I squirm and stare down at my notepad.

A waiter appears with a dustpan and brush and frantically sweeps up the hazardous shards as the MD resumes his speech. I move away from the table and position myself next to the closest wall where I watch the waiter clear up the mess.

A minute later my mobile phone starts to ring. I’d only just got it and was convinced I’d changed the phone profile to offline as I sat on the tube on the way down and messed around with it, like a first date, to see how far it would go.

It’ll go far tonight. I’d accidentally switched the ringtone to a spoof airport public address system message:

 −− ‘Attention! Could the man with the ten-inch penis please come to the phone? Could the man with the ten-inch penis please come to the phone immediately? Thank you.’

The message is loud and clear and keeps repeating itself because, in my panic, I can’t find the phone − a super-small-slim-line special − and when I finally do, I don’t know how to stop it. The MD breaks off − again. The journalist with the wet notepad grabs the phone, switches it off and hands it back to me. He’s got the look of death in his eyes.

‘Thanks. Sorry.’ I stare down at my notepad, again. That’s when you know everyone in the room thinks you’re a wanker.

That’s a Megan moment − Megan Davies, the Applejacks  pop star whom I never met and who doesn’t know me from Adam but who unwittingly brought ridicule back to my place to watch the late, late show.

                                                                   *        *        *

This book is about hating the world for stripping me of self-belief, for not pulling me out of the quicksands of other people’s dreams, for kicking me in the bollocks before they’d even dropped, for generally lying and cheating and hurting but for passing by far too quickly.

This book is also about taming that hatred through memory. ‘Only by acceptance of the past can you alter it,’ said T. S. Eliot, probably recalling the eight years he worked in obscurity for Lloyds Bank. Slipping into memory for me is like slipping out of Clark Kent’s suit: by reliving the past I become immortal. ‘The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,’ said Einstein, while watching the 6.05 special heading down the track.

But this book is mainly about a shedload of pop stars. Pop stars I grew up with, from the Beatles to the Spice Girls. My generation invented pop music as we know it today and we alone have lived through all its guises.

It’s dying.

It has to. One generation’s dreams are another generation’s sorrows. Kids are looking for a different sound. They’ve got heads full of ringtones and Grand Theft Auto and music ain’t enough anymore. That’s why it’s now reduced to a tiny piece of equipment that can store a million love songs and also double-up as a phone, digital recorder, games machine and camcorder.

In the sixties we had radiograms as big as sideboards covered with family photos framed in silver plate, and vases overflowing with plastic tulips courtesy of Daz washing powder. They played big, bold records from big, bold packages.

And when I got my first record player for my first room, the evenings would melt away under the spell of the Beatles. It was mine. It was all I had.

As I got older the music machines got more elaborate, right up to a Toshiba music centre my mum bought in 1976 with built-in cassette player and radio. The cassette was the first nail in the coffin of pop. Cheap, plastic and portable, you could even play your pet sounds in the car. But you can’t listen to music when you drive, you can only hear it. It’s a cheat. It doesn’t deserve that.

If you can’t play, there are only two things you can do to music: listen or dance. The rest is tomfoolery.

The musical gap between 1948 and 1978 is immense, but between ‘78 and now it’s indiscernible. My parents grew up with songs populated by guys and gals falling head over heels in love under an eternally shining June blue moon floating in a heaven full of pennies.  

That all changed in the mid-fifties and pop music continued to develop into the eighties where it started to lose its way. Punk was the last great white music; indie is simply punk with melody. House, garage, drum & bass, hip-hop, R & B, whatever, are souped-up disco and Motown with bollocks. It’s yesterday’s news.

Live concerts are popular today with those who go to relive memories – acts and fans – when once they went in search of them. Pop music is now part of showbiz because my generation can’t let go. We really are the oldest swingers in town with forty and fifty year-olds buying albums made by twenty-somethings. When I was sixteen, pop music was my domain. Middle-aged men would never have dreamed of walking into a record shop to buy Beatles For Sale or Their Satanic Majesties Request or Paranoid.  It would’ve been just plain weird. It wasn’t for them, it was for us. We’d succeeded in stripping the ‘ular’ from popular.

But now pop music belongs to everybody thanks to the cross generation X Factor and EastEnders and Take That and Facebook and Jordan and David Beckham and Prince Harry. It’s been sucked into the showbiz swirl and five hundred ‘fuck’s on a rap album mean fuck all. Pop, in whatever guise, has become the music of the people and got its ‘ular’ back. The young don’t need it like I needed it. Now you could get Cliff Richard and 50 Cents doing the ‘Bachelor Boy’ rap on the Royal Variety Show and nobody would bat an eyelid. Imagine Joe Strummer doing a duet with Des ‘O Connor in ‘77 and you get the picture.

Shit, a recent study revealed that nearly half the fan base of One Direction is old enough to be their mothers.

The game is over and youth has lost its music and, as a result, its youth.   

Music was my life for thirty-five years, but I checked out in 1998 when the Spice Girls sued me, and it’s been painful watching it die in a Jade Goody kinda way. The weekly music press, apart from the death defying NME, has long gone. Smash Hits, like the brilliant big girls’ blouse it was, went on a crash diet and managed to slim down to 40,000 copies from a million and became the skinniest magazine in the skinny magazine graveyard. The record companies dotted across London in funky offices have vanished like vinyl, replaced by a few smirking conglomerates snorting up what they can before the Internet dishes everything out for free.

This book traces that demise.

Shit, this book is about a lot of things.

Maybe it’s time to tame some hatred. Time to get off this train and walk the rest of the way. Time to count moments, not months. Time to see what’s been hurtling by all these years while my eyes were closed and my heart was stranded.

But it won’t slow down as it heads, inexorably, to the last stop and if I jump, I’m toast. So I walk back to happiness through the empty carriages away from the engine in a desperate attempt to slow down time and commit myself unashamedly to memory because it soaks up speed like a ‘77 nostril.

Whenever possible, I like to escape my now and head back to my then when I was young and in love and only disillusioned with myself. I don’t want to listen to the rhythm of this runaway train anymore, telling me what a fool I’ve been. The pouring rain does that already.

I do most of my time travelling in Colindale, home of the British Library, where dead words come to life in the kiss of an eye. Everything I ever wrote about music is enrobed in blue leather and stored lovingly in rooms where the smell of old paper is as intoxicating as Dune Spice.

It’s my youth that smells so sweetly.

Where else will I again share a dressing room with the McCartney’s, get pissed with Paul Weller, re-discover the little-boy- lost secrets of Iggy Pop and fly Concorde to see Earth, Wind & Fire defy gravity like the funky box of tricks they were?

Where else will I relive the day I spent with Barry White at his place in the Hollywood Hills watching the rivers flow, or hear, once again, John Denver slag off his beloved Annie?

And, tell me, where else will I see the Stranglers play the pants off Japan (the country not the group) or go on a guided tour of Bob Marley’s Jamaican home with the dreaded man himself?

Fancy lunch with the Beach Boys on a Santa Monica beach? Your table’s booked and may I suggest the Meat Loaf?

Fancy a night of excess with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richard, in the Playboy Country Club, Milwaukee? Roll up that hundred dollar bill and inhale gently. The ol’ heart may not take to heat, especially deep heat.

Fancy chewin’ the fat with Bruce Springsteen in Maryland? C’mon, don’t be chicken. Or howzabout sharing an afternoon with the sexiest woman in the history of pop? Share away.

Fancy a touch of Rotten, a Strummer bummer, a shock from Sting, a diamond ring? Snow in Texas and pain in Iceland? Fancy eavesdropping on the most embarrassing Megan moment of my life involving Blondie and Frank Warren? Or hearing Paul McCartney call me a bastard? 

Fancy reliving some of the greatest concerts in pop history?

Fancy seeing a grown man’s arse cry?

‘Got live if you want it.’

Now don’t get me wrong; my memory is a blur and I never kept any cuttings from the publications that employed my services. But at the British Library they’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. I want to take them where the music’s playing and dance all night long.

Paul Simon once said, ‘Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.’ I wonder if he knew how right he was.

Six years later Marvin Gaye asked, ‘Where did all the blue skies go?’ It took me thirty years to figure out the answer.

Into the British Library, Marvin. Into the British Library.

  

                                                                         *       *       *

Since writing ‘77 Sulphate Strip, I’ve been asked on more than one occasion (three actually) what Katy did next.

Well, for you three guys, I guess it went something like this...

© Barry Cain 2013

Part 2 tomorrow

 

 

 

Echoes

How many of  you have read the first two blogs? Or was I a lone soul, talking in an empty hall with just the echoes of the past bouncing back at me?

No matter. I’ll plod on. Why change the habit of a lifetime?

Flexipop was a life changer - for me anyway. I was a journalist, it was what I did. But, as usual, shit got in the way and for the next fifteen years after the magazine closed down, I stopped being a journalist and became a publisher of pop magazines, something even my wildest dreams would get wild dreams about.

It paid the rent and I had the odd fandango – like actually flogging a magazine called Pop Shop that I’d started to Robert Maxwell back in 1989. Pop Shop had it all before anyone else: free classified ads (Loot Magazine, EBay), messages and pen pals (Facebook), a boy band plucked out of auditions a la Spice Girls appearing in their own photo story soap opera every month with the readers deciding on their fate (Big Brother). And then turning them into stars (X Factor).

Too much, too soon maybe. But Maxwell ran too fast and turned it from a more grown-up monthly into a fortnightly, ersatz Smash Hits. It didn’t work out. Shame. Shame for him. Shame for me.

So that was the only other bona fide pop mag I published after Flexipop. The rest were mainly unofficial glossy mags on one particular artist that invariably opened up into posters. Got sued a few times by the likes of Human League, Duran Duran and the Spice Girls but they usually dwindled out before reaching court. Did a few official ones too – Michael Jackson, Right Said Fred, The Chippendales, even Pepsi Cola.

I can’t say it was fun while it lasted. It wasn’t. In the main it was dull, something I’d never experienced in the workplace before. But it was kinda easy and I had a family to support. I dealt with printers and repro houses and typesetters and photo agencies and distributors and designers and writers and photographers. Okay, I did all that on Flexipop, but I did it with shiny, happy people. Now here I was, alone, talking on the phone in an empty office with just the echoes of the past bouncing back at me.

Thank God pop music died, otherwise I’d still be there, embedded by echoes.

A few years back I wrote a book called ’77 Sulphate Strip that chronicled a year in my life. A year when I became a music journalist, when punk tripped the light fantastic and when I proposed to my future wife.

It did okay. The sequel, Tell Me When, was completed a while ago but, as usual, shit got in the way and I ended up pushing the manuscript to the back of the drawer. Now we’re in Flexi retro mode, I thought I’d dig it out and run it by you in a series of blogs.

What’s that? Please don’t?

Tough! This is my site and I can do whatever I want. Besides, there’s nobody reading this crap anyway…

Tell Me When begins tomorrow.

Barry Cain

Tarts, charts and boring ol’ farts

Flexipop! was born in November 1980 at the end of punk, in the middle of a ska revival and at the start of New Romance, all set against a backdrop of tarty charts teeming with tarty acts.

Consequently, Flexipop! was a tarty magazine. It was the first publication to have a flexi-disc featuring an exclusive track from a major chart act taped to the cover of each issue. Tarty or what?

My business partner and now celebrated novelist, Tim Lott, and I had both had enough of interviewing pop stars, in the traditional sense at least. It was becoming like any other job, a chore. Pop music had started to get up itself. It needed taking down a peg or two and, occasionally, ridiculed. Pop went poncey and that was never the plan. Sure, it was poncey back in the fifties and sixties, but it was poncey with soul and, besides, it was brand spanking new then. Eighties pop was developing a paunch and a receding hairline.

Bands were beginning to discover the new electronic gadgetry. Playing music was easier than ever before, a whole lot easier than the bass they expected Sid to master in ’77. Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ epitomised the techno boom. It would’ve cost a lot more to make that record three years before. It was good while it lasted but now it means nothing to me.  Like a nice meal you had once in a restaurant the name of which you can’t remember.

Punk had stuck some bollocks into a discofied, moribund music scene and paved the industry’s streets with gold. Record sales were up, the coffers were full. Let’s pump up the volume and paint the town red to match the gold. Let’s get as much shit out as possible and dress it up in as much MTV finery as we can afford. Video may have killed the radio star, but it created pop as visual art and took away its mystery. Now the song was imagined for you, someone else’s interpretation of it was in your head.

When you listened to the lyrics on a Beatles track as it danced on the turntable, you could see the disillusioned girl writing the early-morning letter to her parents in the kitchen before meeting a man in the motor trade; you could see Rocky Racoon falling back in his hotel room and Eleanor Rigby on her hands and knees and the bells on a hill and Kansas City and the USSR, see them all across the universe to Strawberry Fields forever. You could even smell Mr Kite’s benefit at Bishopsgate and feel the cold in that bleak Norwegian Wood bathroom.

MTV donated its organs to the music business and singlehandedly kept it alive and kicking for simple minds. Pop as visual art had given rise to a shitload of pretentiousness. Bands became either peacocks, running like girls down misty streets, or audacious cocks who chewed gum, smoked fags and embraced style over content.  The shit really was hitting the fans.

It was time for a slap down. It was time for Flexipop!.

Tim and I had absolutely no idea how to produce a magazine but that didn’t stop us producing a magazine that looked like it had been produced by someone who had no idea how to produce a magazine. Thank Christ it had an exclusive version of ‘On My Radio’ by the Selecter on the cover or it would’ve sold a great deal fewer than the 48,000 copies it finally shipped. We printed more than 140,000 on a sale or return basis, so, to our amateur eyes, it looked like a meagre return and we both arrived at the conclusion that, for the first time in our professional lives, we’d failed. Big-time.   

The magazine was essentially a dodgily printed 60p ad-free picture fest – black-and-white photo stories starring the Selecter, the Specials and Bad Manners plus colour specials on  UFO, the Jam’s current favourite songs (Paul’s top two are ‘Christine’ and ‘Happy House’ both by Siouxsie and the Banshees) and Madness lifelines.

We even organised a fashion spread with Annabella from Bow Wow Wow, and I do the shoot in a studio with Vivienne Westwood, who was odd and witty and knew exactly what she wanted. She’d designed the whole Annabella pirate look and it was a strong image.

The only real article in Flexipop! with ‘proper’ words was ‘Testament of Youth’, to be a regular feature, in which a star, Ian Gillan in this case, talked about their childhood.

When we discovered the level of returns, Tim and I decided to change some of the content although, to be honest, we didn’t need to worry too much. The exclusive flexi on Flexipop! issue two featured two tracks from the Jam − a new version of ‘Boy About Town’ and ‘Pop Art Poem’.  And the Jam were the biggest band in the land.

We cut the number of photo stories to a main one over three pages – Rat Van Winkle starring the Damned − and a day-in-the-lifestyle two-pager on Hazel O’Connor. Reluctantly, Tim and I both realised we needed to do interviews, so between us ‘did’ Adam Ant, Buster Bloodvessel and Andy McClusky from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

The second issue also featured private holiday snaps from the Police, Siouxsie in ‘Testament of Youth’ and Francis Rossi in ‘Welcome to the Working Week’, another new, self-explanatory, addition. To complement the flexi-disc with a feature, I spent a Sunday with the Jam and their girlfriends at Paul Weller’s house in Woking and end up getting pissed down his local pub.  

The result? We print 125,000 copies and sell 65,000. Now we’re getting there.

The magazine was designed by ex-Sounds man Dave Fudger, and he really started to understand it. Alas, other commitments meant he could only stick around for the first two issues.

Enter former Record Mirror cartoonist, the Dickensian Mark Manning, complete with a deep Bradford accent, a bulldog called Baxter, a ring at the end of his knob, a God-given talent for drawing caricatures and a desperate desire to become a rock star, which he eventually became for a twisty wee while.

Mark, who’d never designed a magazine before, joined an outfit that had never published a magazine before. It was the way of the world and sometimes it works.

 By Barry Cain

21st Century Old Boys!!!

Welcome to the first very first Flexipop! blog.

Actually, would you mind terribly if I take the ! out of Flexipop! for a wee while? It plays hell with the punctuation and confuses the fuck out of my spell checker.

As I was saying:

Welcome to the first very first Flexipop blog.

Ahhh, what a relief. Dispensing with the ! in Flexipop! just then felt like loosening a pair of too-tight-for-your-fat-gut trousers to accommodate a potato-heavy lamb vindaloo and five pints of Kingfisher.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes.

Welcome to the first very first Flexipop blog.

Since last April, we’ve been running a Flexipop fan page on Facebook.  At first, it was the plaything of two sad old men reliving past exploits long ago and far away. Neil Matthews, the magazine’s resident photographer, had saved every issue and kept them in pristine condition in a special folder.

I, on the other hand, didn’t know where one copy was. I had a vague recollection of once stumbling across an old cardboard box full of magazines falling apart in the damp on a rare foray into the loft. My memory served me well. I found the box. It had rotted away and its contents had spilled onto the floor. Old newspapers, the kids’ primary school exercise books, ten-year old bank statements, Sunday supplements, a cuddly toy and… loads of Flexipops.

It was a miracle. I found the lot, from No.1 to No.33. Not only that, each and every one of them still had the flexi-disc attached. Ex-Flexipop scribe and computer guru, Huw Collingbourne, had already launched the Facebook page last October and posted pictures from his complete set of Flexipops - no doubt kept in pristine condition in a special folder – on the first day it was up.

But life, like the bitch it is, got in the way and it took over six months before another post was made. Since then, not one single day has passed without a Flexipop photo or cartoon or Top Ten 80s charts or Fallout Favourites or vintage advert being posted.

It’s fair to say that Neil and I are hooked. Looking at the magazine for the first time in at least a quarter of a century has been a revelation. It really was dramatically different from its contemporaries with an editorial approach that eschewed glitz for shits and stuck a weedy two fingers up to the industry.

It was also different because we were totally independent. Flexipop was a tarted up fanzine with a flexi on the cover that found itself on the shelves of WH Smith and John Menzies alongside the music publications of the day all owned by huge conglomerates. This really was punk publishing in its truest form.  

We wanted to share that vive la difference 80s moment with you on Facebook, but we soon found out it wasn’t enough to convey a true Flexipop experience.

So Neil designed this website.

Hope you like it. xx

Barry Cain

Tomorrow’s Blog : How Flexipop! began.