Source: Still Hanging ‘Round 12″ 45rpm Vinyl Single

It’s the sort of phone call that you do not forget. It’s early 2004, and out of the blue, you get a call from Mark Seymour. This does not happen very often at all.

It’s the Mutations rarities album. It’s being a delinquent child. A second plan had been hatched for the contents – studio b-sides – but we were being typical fans and lobbying for tracks that had been left off.

Mark saw “Honey in the Jar” as boring and was surprised that some fans quite enjoy it. “Mind of an American” was seen as perhaps even slightly embarrassing, being a bit of a faulty extrapolation of hawkish Republican perspectives of the era. “It’s far too long,” Mark lamented on The Unbeliever. Eventually we got all three included, albeit with The Unbeliever in a shortened form.

And “John Riley”? “I was told we needed a b-side,” Mark explained. “And I was the only one left in the studio, so I took a guitar and recorded it.” It was not in the Hunters form. “It is more like my first solo recording than Hunters”, he noted.

Excluded from Mutations along with the inane studio banter of “Who’s On Left?”, “John Riley” was the only distinct b-side song excluded from Mutations. At the time we got assurances that we could one day put it online so everyone could enjoy it… so here, nearly one decade later, is John Riley, as recently ripped from Rob’s personal vinyl collection 🙂