I am not sure whether this is still a thing in mangazines aimed at the teenage market. Come to think of it, I am not sure whether teenage magazines are still a thing in these more tech orientated times. But back in the '70s and '80s such magazines were a newsagent staple for which young adolescents were prepared to be parted from their pocket money. Photostoris were born out of girl's magazines that used photostrips to play out teenage dilema's, of the boy meets girl type. Occasionally, for humerous purposes some of the weekly music papers ran such photo stories in which they featured current bands and this is something that was carried through into the pages of the excellent but short lived 'Flexipop' publication, so named as each issue can with a flexidic single from a featured band. As an aside, these discs were notoriously fragile. Any mishandling of the waffer thin plastic would deform the disc such that your record players stylus would be thrown from the surface of the record rendering the disc unplayable! Anyway back to the photostory thing.
The Stranglers had appeared previously in at least one such photostory within the pages of Record Mirror, so when Barry Cain moved on and set up Flexipop I guess he pulled in a couple of favours and got the Meninblack to repeat the process. Barry had long been a fan and supporter of the band, and in turn, he was one of the few music journalists whose name did not appear in Burnel's black book... indeed, the friendship and respect endures to this day. In this photostory, the band are forced to live in close proximity to each other for 60 days in a nuclear fall-out shelter as part of a scientific experiment sponsored by the military.
In some respects this could be seen as a portent for things to come.
