I'm Bringing Flexi Back

An unusual one today, it's a brief piece I wrote for a my friend Russell's zine, Lunchtime for the Wild Youth (https://lunchtimeforthewildyouth.bandcamp.com/). The issue is all about covermounts, so I wrote this.  Turns out that everyone else pretty much wrote "this free tape changed my life" type stuff, so I'm glad I took a different tack.  Why not buy a copy of one of Russ's mags?  I recommend Ghost Zine, written - or scribbled - by his son, it's a work of art.

The Oinkletts – The Oink Song/ Uncle Pigg – Oink Rap (Free with Oink! Issue 1)

 I was always the ideal editor’s target market, one who would scour the newsagent shelves every week and month and buy any magazine with a sufficiently tempting cover CD (or tape, in earlier days).  I still have reams of these, from dodgy old Q compilations, kept because of a ropy R.E.M. live track, to a surprisingly diverse range of films included with Sunday papers in the noughties, to a complete set of The Wire’s Tapper CDs.

The first ever covermount I got, though, was not a tape or CD but a flexidisc, a concept already pretty dead by 1986 when I bought issue 1 of puerile periodical Oink!, aged 10 (for those who don’t know, Oink! was to Viz what Grange Hill was to The Sweeney).  Unsurprisingly, the disc flexed one too many times well over 30 years ago, so I shall write this review from memory; sure, it’s bound to be on YouTube, but searching the music out seems the wrong way to approach this little piece of pink ephemera (I think the disc was a shade of porcine pink, but that might be the first of many mnemonic fumbles in this article).

Side A was a scrawny nasal little punk pop smirk which I’m surprised to discover wasn’t actually called ‘Poo Poo Tinkle Tinkle Parp Parp Oink’, as this was both the main refrain and what we listeners were encouraged to sing when life rubbed us up the wrong way.  I now see that it was heavily indebted to The Goons’ ‘Ying Tong Iddle I Po’, though it lacked most of the charm.  I heard later that it was written and performed by Marc Riley, so now I know what he did between being in The Fall and turning up on Radio 5 and launching his DJ career; he’s allowed a lacuna of crap between these two, I think you’ll agree.  I remember wanting to like this song, but actually finding it acutely annoying.  The nadir was the verse about teachers, stating

They make me wear school uniform

And stop me chewing gum,

I wish I were a bumblebee,

I’d sting them on their....elbow!

 Even at this tender age, I was aware that the verse-end non-rhyme swear-dodge was a hackneyed ruse deserving of my finest supercilious sneer.  Also I didn’t like chewing gum.  Also, I had heard that bumblebees die when they sting you, so pre-Lard’s staff-room victory would be pyrrhic at best.  Nowadays I’d doubtless link the adenoidal singalong to the work of Frank Sidebottom, though this is notably less really really fantastic.

 The B-side – or were both tracks on one side?  Yes, that seems more likely - was far superior, a chunkily minimal drum-machine clunk which was effectively a rewrite of Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, though if I knew this at the time I certainly only had the loosest conception of the original.  “Don’t eat pigs cos they’re made from ham,” advises Uncle Pigg (the fictional editor of the comic), “eat the nasty butcher man”.  The leap from vegetarianism to cannibalism in a single couplet amused my half-formed mind, as did the authoritative vocal presence.  Although I reasoned that people eat pigs precisely because they’re made from ham, and so was not swayed by this argument, the track was a hit on the Dansette-style turntable my parents had found in the attic for me. 

 This cheap and brash little artefact is not one that I advise you to seek out, more a sonic Kinder toy than a forgotten treasure, but even the terrible music we listened to when young shapes us.  Tellingly, I can still sing at least half of the lyrics from memory.  “I’ll sing it till I stop”, as ‘The Oink Song’ claimed in its dying moments.  Quite zen, really.  For a record made by a pig.