This week I turn over the Flexibition to a very special guest, someone who is in the midst of researching and documenting some of the weirdest flexi discs in the world. Stephen Coates aka The Real Tuesday Weld has been collecting ‘bone discs’ from Russia for the last few years and, due to the subject matter with Halloween approaching, I thought he’d be the perfect choice to feature some of his collection.

“Some of the strangest flexis ever made were created secretly in the Soviet Union during the cold war era.
In a culture where the recording industry was completely controlled by the state, music-mad bootleggers used an extraordinary alternative means to spread the music they loved – they re-purposed used x-ray film as the basis for making records of forbidden music.

THE WINE OF LOVE (Вино любви) Pyotr Leshchenko

But why would a song like the ‘The Wine of Love’ on this ‘bone record’ be forbidden? Its innocent, romantic lyrics don’t seem anti-Soviet in any way, but emigre singers like Leshchenko who lived abroad outside the Soviet Union rather than returning to help the great march forward, were considered traitors and so all their repertoire became banned, though it remained hugely popular.

Even before the revolution of 1917, the arts were subject to some control in Russia and during the Soviet period, particularly from 1932, a censor decided what could be published, exhibited or performed. By the time the cold war kicked in in the late 1940s, a lot of music was very difficult to get hold of – until the x-ray bootleggers got to work.  Originally they were really just music fans and audiophiles doing a bit of private business by copying records from before the war or the odd gramophone disc smuggled into the country, but up until around 1964, as the technique of making the bootlegs spread, something like a million of these ‘bone’ discs were cut. They weren’t pressed like conventional flexis but written, laboriously in real time at 78rpm with home made recording lathes, and so, incredibly, each is an edition of one –  sounding and looking different from all the others.

MISHKA – Pavel Rudakov

They are nearly always single sided, very thin and the sound quality varies hugely depending on the skill of the bootlegger and the quality of the film. They didn’t last long but were cheap and sold pretty much like soft drugs are now – in dark corners or parks. Another big genre of music cut onto them was Russian music made inside the Soviet Union but which, as the censor tightened, had also became forbidden because it had certain rhythms (like the foxtrot or the tango) which were considered licentious or was in a style or with lyrics that were considered uncouth or shallow. Basically anything that the authorities didn’t like or was thought unhelpful in developing a communist state of mind was out.

But the official stuff on offer was often very boring and worthy and so of course, as well as the homegrown music they loved, young people in particular wanted to listen to cool Western music, which although completely banned, might be caught on the odd radio broadcast from Europe. So jazz, rock n roll, boogie woogie and latin dance tunes increasingly began to appear on bone bootlegs.

MAMBO – unknown 

From the late 1950s, there was another sub-genre of soviet flexi bootlegs on ‘audio postcards’ or ‘sound letters’.  These were picture disc recording blanks made for and sold in official shops – usually in tourist areas. People could go into these shops and pay to use a machine to record a novelty greeting for the folks at home or select one from a menu of official tunes to be pressed onto one of the picture discs. Of course, after hours or under the counter, much more interesting tunes could be cut and sold. These discs carried on being made right up until the 1970s.

But the ‘bone era’ of x-ray recordings ended around 1964, not because the authorities wiped it out or because of the brutal punishments they inflicted on the bootleggers when they caught them, but because in the more open climate of the sixties, ordinary citizens were allowed to have reel to reel tape recorders and immediately there was no longer any need for the laborious process, poor quality and unpredictable results of the x-ray flexis made by hand.

THE X-RAY AUDIO PROJECT
I first came across one of these discs a few years ago after I had been performing in Russia. Fascinated, I set up the X-Ray Audio Project with photographer Paul Heartfield to research, record, collect and publish their images and sounds and to tell the stories of the people who made and listened to them

For more information check out www.x-rayaudio.squarespace.com or my TED X talk”. (below)

The X-Ray Audio exhibition will be at Vivid Projects in Birmingham in November and will return to The Horse Hospital in London in December before traveling to further venues in 2016.

On December 5th I will be in conversation with Stephen at the same venue, showcasing various examples of the flexis I’ve been posting in the Flexibition, playing them and maybe even handing them around so that people can get a closer look. More details for ‘A Night at the Flexibition’ are here.

The book ‘X-RAY AUDIO – The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone’ will be published in December by Strange Attractor Press and a Special Edition of 500 copies come with a flexidisc insert containing original Bone music.

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