28 November 2005

Rolling Stones - Exile On Main Street flexi

1972



For those unfamiliar with the format, a flexidisc was a 7inch record pressed on very thin plastic. The sound quality was rubbish to start with, even before it picked up the creases inevitable to such a thin item, but it was enough to give the listener a decent enough clue to the music, and it was cheap and light making it ideal for give-aways.

One such give-away was the flexi that came with the 29th April 1972 edition of New Musical Express.

On one side was some tosh by Curved Air and something called Blind Alley by Fanny, whoever the hell they were. It's the stuff on the other side we're concerned with.

Two weeks before the release of Exile On Main Street, here were excerpts of four tracks (All Down The Line, Tumbling Dice, Shine A Light and Happy), linked by a track called Exile On Main Street Blues. This song is a slow piano boogie with Jagger singing a lyric that strings together a load of the titles of the album tracks. It's a great little oddity, and as far as I know it's never been officially reissued anywhere.

I've put up two MP3s - one's the full flexi, and on the other I've cut out the album tracks so it's a splicing together of Exile On Main Street Blues on its own.

[MP3s deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I trust you are kidding about Curved Air and Fanny. I caught Curved Air live in '76 or so and they were not half bad. They had a real sexy girl singer if I recall.

Fanny were the first girls to make America stone deaf forever. It is a given their music was vastly overshadowed by the influence they had on the Runaways and a whole lotta rock 'n' roll Rosies after them.

- Mr. Beer N. Hockey

Anonymous said...

Fanny was a top all girl band - Suzi Quatro's big sister was in it - Fanny Hill is a decent album
They were Yanks - hence the lack of irony about the name - means ARSE over there,,

, one of their songs was a jingle on RadioOne for ages

Drew Peacock

Anonymous said...

Rest assured, I'm a fan of the Stones, but I'm listening to the Fanny track 'Blind Alley' right now, which was on this flexi, and it's brilliant. I remember playing this a lot from that flexi, which my brother got 'cos he subscribed the the NME at the time.

Anonymous said...

PLEASE REPOST
PLEASE REPOST ELSEWHERE
PLEASE!!!

merrick said...

Anonyperson - leave your email address in the comments. It gets sent to me, I send you the MP3 via transferbigfiles.com, then delete the comment (so it never appears online). Simples.