Flip It Over: A Small Ode to the B-Side and the Joy of Not Knowing What You'll Get

My mate Dean has a theory that every cultural problem in Britain can be traced back to the moment we stopped having to physically flip something over to hear more music. Dean is wrong about most things — he also believes a Wetherspoons curry club constitutes a personality — but on this one, I think he might be onto something.

The Wild West on the Wrong Side

The B-side, for the uninitiated under-40s, was the second groove on a seven-inch single. Back in the vinyl era, the A-side was the business: the radio play, the Top of the Pops appearance, the reason you'd parted with £2.49 in Woolworths. The B-side was... well, nobody quite knew. And that was the entire point.

It was the artist's playground. Freed from the pressure of a hit, bands got weird. The Smiths, who could have phoned in a cover of a Wurzels song and still topped the indie charts, gave us B-sides like "Paint a Vulgar Picture" demos and oddities that never troubled an album. Blur stuck "Magleam"-style curiosities and sprawling instrumentals on their flips. The Stone Roses put fifteen minutes of noodling on the back of "One Love" because, presumably, they could. Even the greats treated it like a dare.

Fans, in turn, treated it like a treasure hunt. You bought the single on spec. You dropped the needle on track two with the frosted-glass hope of a scratch-card punter. Sometimes you got a clunker. Sometimes you got "How Soon Is Now?" — yes, that was a B-side, a fact so absurd it should be taught in schools.

When Everything Is Nothing

Then streaming arrived, and with it the great flattening. Every song ever recorded now sits in the same infinite queue, rendered identical by a play button. There is no flip side. There is no side at all. There is only the algorithm, gently nudging you towards the forty-three seconds of a song it thinks you'll tolerate before skipping.

The casualty isn't music itself — there's more of that than ever. The casualty is discovery with stakes. When everything is available at once, nothing feels like a find. My Spotify Release Radar knows what I want before I do, which is efficient in the way a meal replacement shake is efficient. The B-side worked precisely because it was inefficient: a gamble, a dud risk, a small act of faith in a band's leftover impulses.

There's also something democratic about it that we've lost. B-sides were where a band's sense of humour lived, where B-sides mocked their own A-sides, where you learned that your favourite brooding post-punk frontman secretly wanted to be in a skiffle band. Streaming has no room for the joke track. It has a skip rate instead.

Enter the Bandcamp Revival

But hold the funeral. There's a curious thing happening on the margins: Bandcamp Fridays, where the platform waives its cut and artists shift vinyl and cassettes (cassettes! again!) directly to fans. Buy a physical release there and you'll often find the old rituals intact — exclusive flips, bonus tracks, the sense that you've been handed something rather than served it.

Small British labels have noticed. Press runs of 300, hand-stamped sleeves, a B-side that exists on 300 copies on Earth and nowhere else. That's not nostalgia; that's scarcity doing what scarcity does best — making things matter.

So dig out your old seven-inches. Flip them over. Half of them will be rubbish. That's the good news.

Frank Popp writes about music, life and nonsense at frankpopp.co.uk. Dean was not consulted on this article and will be insufferable about it.