Bring Back The Bring Backers

STEVEN HARTLEY, ‘THE BEATLES FOREVER’ b/w ‘THE STATE I’M IN’ (private, 1976/1977)

I think I once heard absurdism defined as viewing the correct path and choosing not to take it: a description which could just as easily double as a summation of my record buying habits.

Over the last weekend, with a friend who was in town for a visit, we hit the stores and thrifts, flipped through tons of worthy titles, both in the bins and on the walls. We held some. But did we deign to buy any of them? Nope.

I don’t really know what it says about me personally or as a conscious consumer that I tend to gravitate towards the bowels of the most boned-out dogshit imaginable (biggest score aside from this 45 was a Hare Krishna disco LP).

Maybe I’m an absurdist? Maybe I’m bored? In any event, to say that maybe I’m amazed at the way Steven Hartley chooses to broadcast his love for Liverpool’s fave foursome would be putting it mildly (the line about their hairstyles being particularly choice). The swansong lounge suicide flip is also pretty rad.

Listen: if this is the sound of the abyss staring back, then I’m more than content to window-shop in the void forever, all the live-a-long day.

David Peel, consider yourself on notice! BRING BACK STEVEN HARTLEY!


‘THE BEATLES FOREVER’


‘THE STATE I’M IN’