Exciting news is the discovery of some very rare and unusual George Formby recordings. Responsibility for unearthing the discs goes to GFS member Chris Webster. The story of the discovery is interesting in itself ; a set of 49 discs was discovered some years ago in a loft in a house in Croydon. The recordings were put up for sale a few months ago after the owner had passed away. Even even though Chris Webster resides in Spain, he knew that the collection was important enough for him to make the trip back to the UK to purchase the discs. Chris is well known in Gilbert & Sullivan circles for the restoration of recordings in that field and he has used his sound restoration equipment and expert knowledge to get the best from the Formby recordings. Not only are the Feen-A-Mint recordings now available, but also rare interviews and live Formby performances are for sale under Chris's SOUNDS ON CD label and are available in our GFS SHOP. Chris Webster has set about opening our ears to much more than the existing collection of CD's that all respectable Formby fans will posses. With the release of the Feenamint recordings Chris has allowed us a wonderful opportunity to go right back to 1938/1939 to hear exactly what listeners to the wireless in those far distant days would have enjoyed. The quality of the recordings is excellent, Formby fans have always been grateful for any rare recordings even if the quality was terrible - these recordings are the rarest of all and the quality is spot on! The Feenamint shows were prerecorded at an independent studio and then the discs (four 78s per show) were delivered to Radio Luxembourg for broadcast. George Formby used an independent studio (Levy's in New Bond Street, London) which is now long gone and for which I assume their archive of George's masters is too, assuming they were ever even kept. Therefore the only chance of any material surviving would be from the studio copies of the discs. These were also considered to be long gone until 49 of them were discovered in an attic in Mitcham in the late 1970's when a newly married couple moved into their first home. Sadly the husband died in 2010 and his widow decided to put the records up for sale and that is where Chris Webster comes into the story. Chris reports, "each disc label is an identical printed template with only the typed on show and part numbers differentiating them, so if you've seen one, then you've seen them all. Each disc has its own matrix number stamped in to the run-out groove area which reveals (assuming the chronology of the matrices is accurate) that the parts were not often recorded in sequence per the side order within the show and sometimes the shows were recorded out of broadcast sequence.