I Love 1980 - 23

John Foxx - My Face (flexi disc)

Not so much a tribute to the song (you've had your share already John Foxx!) more a homage to the format itself. Smash Hits, and others, occasionally gave a way a free coloured flexi disc with their fornightly magazine, which was a pioneer publication in covering music trends in a unique style. The Foxx track was released in such a format 30 years ago this week.
Smash Hits flexis seem to have been mostly by artists on Virgin - Squeeze, XTC, Skids, OMITD; Foxx - a label which, as already mentioned, was particularly aware of new sounds and new means of distributing music to the kids., although later other labels took up on the idea and occasionally issued pieces of wobbly plastic via SH and other mags too. The Flexi-Pop! magazine was lanched in 1980, and had a free flexi disc each issue, often with exclusively recorded songs by bands of the moment (Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, The Jam, Haircut 100..)
The sound quality of the track(s) on the discs were never excellent of course, even by vinyl standards, and more than often you had to put a 10p piece on the needle or on the centrre of the disc itself to make sure it played properly on yer record player. But this was 1980, we didn't worry too much about scratches and, hey, they were free!


This particular track by Foxx remained exclusive to this release right up until the year 2000 when it finally saw the light of day in non-flexi form on the Modern Art compilation. Its total electronic style was in keeping with the year's Metamatic, although according to SH blurb the song "is just one of the forty or so tracks that the man has been working up while preparing for his second solo album". Ironically it was his last 'electronic' song to be released before moving on (or back) to a more 'organic' sound with drums and guitars with The Garden and susbequent 80s albums. Foxx would return to electronics some ten years later with the Nation 12 project with Tim Simenon in 1991 and again from 1995 with Louis Gordon. He is currently working on electronic music with producer and all round analogue geek Benge as John Foxx & The Maths.



read Ryan Foley's History of the flexi disc here.
flexi-pop facebook group here
thanks, as ever, to Brian McCloskey's SH archive

Listen: John Foxx - My Face