HEARING ‘DISAPPEARING’

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I’VE never understood why it’s so unpopular to admit you like popular music.

I loved pop music when I was growing up — I guess all kids do. But I never grew out of it. I’m 43 and I still love the high I can get from a pop song. Not the Britney and the Miley shit (or practically all of the top 100 songs on iTunes at any given moment, for that matter), but well-crafted pop by artists like Fountains of Wayne, The Changes, Robyn, New Found Glory, The Format, Jimmy Eat World, Butch Walker and Lily Allen. The three-and-a-half-minute songs with chiming choruses that can actually bring a smile to your face the first time you hear them. The perfect melodies that make you wonder why no one ever strung those notes and chords together before.

While my classmates in high school were listening to the Doors (whose resurgence in the early ’80s completely confounded me), Zep and Halen, I was lovin’ the poppier, more modern sounds of the Cars and Flock of Seagulls and the Police and Talking Heads and the Pretenders and Marshall Crenshaw and XTC and Missing Persons and the Clash. The Doors were dead to me, and my music was the sound of happier days to come.

Then in 1981, I heard it — the perfect pop song. Some programming director must have accidentally let it slip through, because I don’t remember it getting much radio airplay. But it was love at first sound.

It was “Disappearing,” by some group called the Sinceros. I bought the 45. I bought the album, “Pet Rock.” The Sinceros were British (like most of the bands I liked back then), they wrote great new-wavey power pop, and they brought in Elton John’s producer, Gus Dudgeon, to sweeten the pot that was “Pet Rock,” their second LP.

I’ll never understand why “Disappearing” wasn’t a hit and “Keep On Loving You” was. Over the years, I’ve searched high and low for the album, or even the song, on CD. They’re just not there. The too-appropriately-named “Disappearing” isn’t on any ’80s compilation CD (though the band’s minor minor hit “Take Me To Your Leader,” from their debut album, is on a couple.) And “Pet Rock” has never been released on CD, which is a crime, as it’s one of the best power pop/rock albums ever recorded.

Recently, I found a fellow fan online, at a blog called VINYL GOLDMINE. The guy’s written a love letter to “Pet Rock” and the Sinceros: The Sinceros: More of the Best Power Pop You’ve (Probably) Never Heard. He’s uploaded the LP on his site, and I stole “Disappearing” from him. I’m posting it below so you can hear it, probably for the first time, almost three decades after I did.

There’s no way you’ll love the song as much as I did, as a geeky high school sophomore who never got into “Free Bird” or “Stairway to Heaven,” a boy whose family was disintegrating around him, a kid who kinda wanted to disappear himself. Just know that it made me happier then, and it still does.

LISTEN TO “Disappearing” by The Sinceros