Precious Things - How My Smiths and Moz Collection Began

PRECIOUS THINGS

How My Smiths and Moz Collection Began

The list of dates from my notebook detailing when I bought my Smiths albums for the first time

It all began on 16^th September 1988, which is a date that is forever etched in my mind.  I’d already been mesmerised by the beautiful Everyday Is Like Sunday back in May/June of Nineteen Eighty Hate as a 15 year old teen fresh out of high school, but hadn’t yet been brave enough to purchase the single or any other Moz records available at that point. 

Then, on 5^th September of the same year, by which time I’d turned 16, Rank by The Smiths was released.  My Youth Training Scheme was well under way by now and I was on placement at my local council’s Education Department, so I had a miniscule disposable income burning the smallest of holes in my pocket.  I deliberated for a few days, and then on the 16^th took the plunge and bought the album that would alter the course of my entire life (the brown cassette version of course, as this was my format of choice, not to mention the most affordable!).  When I got home from work, I sat at the family dining room table, put on my Walkman, inserted the tape, and hit play.

My original Rank cassette, brown edition, bought  at age 16 on 16^th September 1988

Talk about my tiny little mind being completely and utterly blown! I literally transformed irreversibly before my very own eyes as a person as each wondrous number played, starting with the sheer brutal force of The Queen Is Dead, through the nuclear paranoid majesty of Panic and taking in the delightful romp of Rusholme Ruffians, as well as the proper in your face fire and ire of London to name but a few highlights, and by the time it came to the fantastic climax of the epic Bigmouth Strikes Again, I was forevermore a changed child!  I became a Smiths and Mozzer devotee on the spot, so beginning a lifelong love affair which is nearing 30 years in duration at the time of writing this here piece, and would spend the next few weeks fervently buying all of The Smiths’ albums.  I still hadn’t “come out” to my folks as a fan as it were, as being an iddy biddy black girl, I knew they’d find it hard to understand my new-found passion for a group of second generation Irish lads.  But come out I did, and boy am I glad!  I’ve always had a penchant for pretty little white boys of the Indie variety in particular, which is why I married one down the line!  Hee hee!

A cheeky alternative design for Rank featuring Yours Truly as a bairn, courtesy of Andy “Tony Merchison” Barnett

So then, now that I was a disciple of the Church of Smiths and His Very Mozzerness and had purchased all of the group’s albums, at the very beginning of 1989 my collection began in earnest.  I tracked down all of Morrisey’s singles and Viva Hate, and The Smiths’ singles on vinyl.  Down the years, I have also acquired many t-shirts, badges, CDs, tapes, postcards, bootleg videos, DVDs, books, bags, posters, tour programmes, ticket stubs from Moz gigs I've been to and all manner of wonderful items.  I was even on TV back in 2016 on the BBC Four series People’s History of Pop, such is the level of degree of my devotion to the cause!

A somewhat heftier me on BBC Four’s People’s History of Pop Series, 2016

I used to have a fabulous list which I painstakingly compiled and maintained of ALL my precious things, which I referred to as “The Catalogue”.  This was issued, as it were, to some friends and many of the record shops I used to frequent at the time in my native Huddersfield and beloved Mancunia.  Unfortunately, I have long since carelessly mislaid my own copy which includes many CDs I lost in a house move some years ago and had to replace when I could face it over a decade after the incident, going off memory and some diaries I kept in the 1990s.  So, my dearly departed catalogue now serves as a “List of the Lost”, in that it is a lost list of possessions I have lost!  Now there’s a tongue twister for you!  Ironically, I’m fairly certain I know that one of the recipients it was regularly sent to back in the day was none other than Mozzer himself!  If you’re reading this Moz, could you do a girl from the Hudd(ersfield) a favour, and bung me a copy in the post?  Or better yet, could you drop by with it in person? There’s a brew in it for ya, with cashew milk of course!

A mere smidgeon of my unfeasibly large collection, my Moz Tour Programmes

Angie J Cooke of Manchester
Formerly Angie J Lewis of Huddersfield
Aka The Spy, as christened by Morrissey on 17^th March 1994