From The Archive - How I Started My Own Pop Magazine

Didn't make much money but it was a lot of fun.

Flexipop!'s shameless pop legacy

Tim Lott, The Guardian, 4 February 2010

Trashy, silly and unashamedly puerile, Flexipop! only lasted two years. But, says novelist Tim Lott, who started the magazine, its revolutionary spirit can still be felt 30 years on

IN 1980, A NEW music magazine appeared. In some ways it was a bad magazine. The design looked as if it had been executed by a chimp. The paper quality was poor and the contents were puerile. However, it had one characteristic that made it stand apart from all the other pop music magazines of that time — something that made it prophetic. Aware that it needed a gimmick to sell itself in a time of intense competition (a new, independent media was opening up as the old print unions began to lose their power over the production process in the face of new technology), the magazine gave away a free gift with every issue — a flimsy, coloured 7in record printed on plastic, called a flexidisc. Thus, Flexipop! was born.

That first issue had an exclusive track by the Selecter, then at the vanguard of the 2-Tone movement. It later featured artists such as Adam and the Ants, the Jam and the Boomtown Rats. Nowadays, it is almost forgotten — but not quite. On the internet, you will find not only a number of music compilations dedicated to the magazine (Night of Flexipop volumes 1–10) but also a band (The Flexipop Appreciation Society). There are, apparently, Flexipop nights in clubs across America.

I must at this point declare an interest in this odd piece of music history. I invented Flexipop! at the age of 24, along with my business partner at the time, Barry Cain.

This story comes in two parts: the trumpet-blowing part, then the bit about what it was like to launch a magazine from scratch in the early 1980s when you didn't have a clue what you were doing.

First, the trumpet. Flexipop!, trashy though it undoubtedly was — it was meant to be trashy — was unique. Obviously, offering a different media as part of the package — which nearly every magazine and newspaper does now, 30 years later — made it pioneering. But Flexipop!'s innovation went further than that.

It represented the first reaction against the previous decade of music reportage, dominated by the NME, which were ultra-serious, almost sociological organs. Writers such as Paul Morley and Ian Penman would rarely get through 500 words without mentioning Baudrillard, Rimbaud or postmodern theory. Photos were grey, the attitude was deadly serious.

Barry and I believed that pop music should be fun again. So we printed half the magazine in glossy colour, which no other pop magazine at that time had done. Our only rival, Smash Hits, was largely printed on poor quality pulp paper and featured only song words, rather than editorial content.

The Flexipop! cover was vulgar, brash and burst out at you like an explosion in paintball factory. Issue one came out the same month as the Face was launched. The Face was much better written and produced. Nick Logan, who launched it, knew more about magazines and visual flair than Barry and I put together. But it was concerned with matters of high style. Flexipop! dealt with pop music in a pop style, taking it back to its shallow, larky roots.

Crucially, we wanted to remove journalists from the equation and hand the magazine over to the readers and the bands themselves. That, along with our commitment to be led by pictures rather than words, represented an innovative approach which was subsequently copied across the board.

In this spirit, we disinterred Lifelines from its 1960s past — a series of random questions that the Guardian would, years later, launch in a different form as the Guardian Questionnaire. Our feature Testament of Youth, in which a celebrity talked about their years growing up now appears in the Daily Mail's Saturday magazine as Me and My School Photo.

There was one other, even more important innovation — The Wax Factor. This, rather than reviewing a record, simply surveyed other media to see what they thought. Again, this idea was appropriated by many other magazines — at its most extreme, by the Week. (Before Flexipop!, it was considered cheating to use a rival's material.)

Enough trumpet-blowing. I acknowledge that we were silly, poorly produced and full of rather ridiculous photo stories — stolen from teenage girls' magazines but populated in our case with pop stars such as Bad Manners and Annie Lennox rather than teenage models. We probably deserved to fold after two years — undercut by the rapidly developing Smash Hits, which beat us in price and surpassed us in production values. Fatally for us, they also started to give away flexidiscs.

In the end, we were a failure — but we were an innovative failure. And the flexidiscs are still wonderful curiosities if you can get hold of them. My favourite was Adam and the Ants doing 'A.N.T.S.' to the tune of 'YMCA', with the Pretenders' 'Stop Your Sobbing' a close second. However, 'Dun Laoghaire' by the Boomtown Rats is probably better forgotten (as are, in my opinion, the Rats generally).

How did we get the magazine off the ground in the first place? In 1980, England was still a semi-socialist country. The world of business was viewed with suspicion by many, and the unions were almighty. Barry and I, along with a whole generation, wanted freedom to be our own bosses, so we had set up a journalistic agency a few years before. At that time, a client called David Brown, who reminded me irresistibly of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, used to order copy off the shelf — 1,000 words on this, 500 on that. He would pay by handing over large brown envelopes full of old banknotes.

It was on odd way to conduct business, even then. It turned out he worked for the porn magnate David Sullivan. Brown told us that Sullivan had spare capacity on the presses that he owned for his porn magazines, and he wanted to fill them up with a magazine of some sort — any sort, apparently. We were offered a contract to come up with any kind of magazine we wanted in return for no pay but half ownership of the resulting publishing company — which was to become Flexipop!.

Flexipop! struggled for a while, subsidised by producing purely exploitative one-off poster magazines, mainly sparked by the craze for Adam and the Ants and what critics called the New Pop (though we made thousands from a John Lennon tribute sheet written before Lennon was even in the ground). Finally, when a big print bill from Sullivan came due, we refused to pay unless he signed the company over to us. We waited for the concrete overcoats to arrive — the people were dealing with all appeared to us like the figures you see in gangster movies — but, amazingly, we managed to out-hustle the hustlers to become sole owners of our own magazine.

Now, at last, Flexipop! became quite successful — for a while. We were still surrounded by rogues and chancers, though. Our advertising manager ran off with the tapes for one of our flexidiscs in order to start his own magazine. We actually sat on his doorstep for hours, physically threatening him in order to get the tapes back.

We had become part hustlers, part writers, part editors, part businessmen. The production of the magazine became a sort of glorious farce, with pop stars appearing in the offices to participate in our photo stories while our designer, Mark Manning — later to become a minor pop star himself as Zodiac Mindwarp — worked downstairs, like a seriously disturbed troll, frequently under the influence of LSD.

The magazine became increasingly professional in appearance — and increasingly demented. We had a cartoon strip about the adventures of a toilet and our mascot became an obscure cartoon figure called Zippy the Pinhead. We unaccountably gave page after page over to an attractive young woman we knew only as the Baroness. After two years, and 20 or so issues, the magazine closed.

Thirty years on, I am older, serious about life and serious about writing. But in the early 80s, like most kids in their early 20s, I just wanted a laugh. Flexipop! was that — a great big laugh. It deserved a better fate — or at least some kind of memory trace in the history of the media.

But I will never regret a moment of it. Our motto was "Pure Pulp for Pinheads" and that sums up the magazine perfectly. We were stupid, shameless and proud of it. In 2010, that's the way everyone is. Now that's what I call a legacy.