Mark Hodkinson’s elegiac return to the world of the self-financed seven-inch single, seen by so many pop groups of the 1970s and 1980s as a route into the big time, began with a voice wryly remarking, “Twenty-five years on and we’re still struggling to fathom why it never happened for us.” The Single Life (15 January) was full of this kind of thing – broken dreams, prolonged effort without much in the way of recompense – and yet it was marked by a lack of bitterness. When one survivor observed that you needed a thousand also-rans to have one Picasso, you sensed that he meant every word.Hodkinson, who had served time in a highly obscure outfit called Monkey Run, began his enquiry in the basement of the Vinyl Tap in Huddersfield, rootling through the 30,0