The flexi disc has, for a physically flimsy format, an incredibly diverse background, and its story incorporates everyone from the Beatles, David Bowie, and ABBA, to Alice Cooper and heavy metal. In terms of retail it cropped up with National Geographic, in a million-dollar McDonalds campaign, and on the covers of numerous teenybopper magazines. It ended up pressed into illegal black-market X-rays in the Soviet Union, and even helped the noted liar Richard "Tricky Dicky" Nixon become US president in 1968

Flexi discs (not "flexidiscs") sold in their tens of millions during the 60s, 70s, 80s, and the early 1990s—before virtually disappearing from the face of the earth for a decade and a half. But, as befits a product based on a continuous spiral scratch, that was not quite the end...

Other "musical postcards"—crude grooves pressed into card—had been around and selling fitfully since way back in 1950. And some vinyl flexi discs did appear in Britain in the latter half of the 1950s, although most of these were of very poor quality, technically speaking. The refined flexi disc was developed, patented, and introduced by the American company Eva-Tone Incorporated a few years later, in 1962, and was at first called "the Eva-tone Soundsheet." This new kid on the block had several advantages over its "parents": the singing postcard and the original spiral-stylus-groove product we know as the vinyl record.

Eva-tone’s Soundsheet flexi undoubtedly sounded better than the card versions that preceded it, and since flexis used only a fraction of the amount of vinyl that regular records did, it meant that they were far cheaper to press, store, and transport. Often the process actually involved polyvinyl chloride rather than pelleted vinyl, which made it cheaper still. On top of this, the fact that these products were truly flexible meant they could be sold on the covers of or inside magazines, booklets, and newspapers. They were truly durable, too, unlike the 78rpm shellac discs which could easily fracture into pieces if dropped from, say, a chair, or vinyl 45s which, while stronger than shellac pressings, could also be snapped by accident.

One slight issue

It seemed like a win-win situation but, as with its immediate British predecessors, there were always a few drawbacks with Eva-tone’s flexi disc. For one thing, 12-inch or even 10-inch LPs were hard to make because flexis were so lightweight: a typical flexi disc single or EP would usually weigh between 4.5 and 6.5 grams—the same as one or two sugar cubes. The paper or card sleeves that they came in would often be heavier than this, at around 9g. Compare that with the 40g weight of a typical vinyl single—or the 200g of many 78rpm shellac singles—and you see how much raw material was being saved.

Then there was the fact that heavier cartridges on many turntables would literally grind the flexi’s playback to a halt. In normal circumstances there were only two ways out of this: play the flexi while it was on top of a normal vinyl single, or place a coin or two somewhere near the centre of the disc—some later Soundsheet pressings actually contained a circle marked out for where the coin, or coins, should best be placed. Sometimes you even had to try both tricks at the same time to get a record to play.

There were two other, more insoluble, problems with this new super-thin record. First, although to less discerning ears the sound quality might have appeared a close rival to standard vinyl on the first few plays, flexis never had the complete frequency range of full-weight 45s, or 7.5-inches-per-second tape recordings. Professional use in, say, a radio station was out of the question unless there were literally no other versions of the track in question. The other irritant was the fact that flexis faded faster: their shallower, moulded grooves meant increased surface noise, while scratches appeared more quickly and came through louder, so skipping and jumping soon became a major problem for any disc that got more than few plays.

Big moments in flexi history

For all of the above reasons, the use of the Soundsheet quickly became restricted to three main—albeit large—areas: band promos, children’s records, and giveaways for magazines, which were usually, though not exclusively, music papers.

A typical example came when The Beatles sent out flexi discs to their fan club in 1964; the one below features a ridiculous singalong and some personal messages to their followers.

The Fab Four did it again in 1967, although the delivery was marginally less tongue-in-cheek and more slapdash, although this time there was at least a song attached.

A year later, Richard Nixon won the 1968 US election with a well-funded campaign that used the Soundsheet in its campaign materials. Over a million were sent out to voters in key states, marked "Nixon’s The One!" and featuring a speech by the man himself.

But they were cheap(ish) and cheerful, and sales continued to hold their own throughout the late 1960s. A promotional recording from the early 1970s shows how much of an industry the flexi had become; note that the disc shown in the link below is actually a square sheet—appropriate for the format’s original name—a shape which most American pressing plants stayed with till the end. As an aside, in the US "soundsheet" has always remained a more popular term than flexi disc.

In Britain, vinyl pressing companies such as Lyntone licensed the enhanced manufacturing process from Eva-tone and opted for the more descriptive name of "flexi disc," as it was felt that the addition of "disc" reinforced the connection with vinyl records, while the original US name would make music lovers confuse it with sheet music. Industry insiders were also no doubt sick to death of that old music hall joke: “Do you like sheet music? ‘No, I just like the good stuff…'”

David Bowie was helped by the principle if not the actual disc itself, when his breakthrough album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars became one of the fastest movers during the summer of 1972. RCA records, his music label at the time, was worried that they couldn’t get enough vinyl to keep up with the huge sales demand—a quick million seller was a big deal for a UK album back then—and it feared that fickle teenage pop fans would buy something else if forced to wait a week or two for deliveries to the vinyl stores, a fear that was perhaps not totally groundless even back then. So RCA Records used the Dynaflex disc for tens of thousands of Ziggy Stardust pressings, using a thin slab of vinyl that was superior to the flexi but which weighed 25 percent less than the usual album.

RCA Records got its pressings done in time, Ziggy stayed in the album charts and was soon virtually living at Number One, and Bowie had become a bona fide star.