Wobbly Sounds: A Collection of British Flexi Discs

A compendium of Britain’s most remarkable flexi discs, from famed ephemera aficionado Jonny Trunk

For this book, the acclaimed music and ephemera aficionado Jonny Trunk (editor of The Music Library and Dressing for Pleasure) has brought together over 150 of the most remarkable flexi discs. Cheap, disposable, often with poor audio quality but with great visuals, flexi discs were vinyl’s poorer cousin in the pre-digital age. Given away with magazines such as New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Private Eye, or sent out by advertisers, they were a splashy way of getting your message heard.

Pressed onto laminated card or thin, wobbly plastic, these discs extolled the virtues of washing powders, beers and banks. Specially commissioned tunes took as their unlikely subjects shoe shops, bakers and even dentists.

Wobbly Sounds brings together more than 150 of the most remarkable British flexi discs from the 1950s to the early 1990s, chronicling the varied and sometimes bizarre uses of these flimsy records. The result is a fascinating archive of postwar design and advertising ingenuity.