The latter half of 1983 was the first flush of my devotion to John Peel, and as a late starter I absorbed as much as I could. It was a great time, too, with The Fall, the Cocteau Twins, New Order, Sudden Sway, and those Smiths sessions. But you and I had only just become friends, and I can't have been passing on all my discoveries. So that's how, at the beginning of our second term in January 1984, you came into my room and said, "Hey, some of my friends have been in the charts."
"Really?" I replied, "What are they called?"
"The Smiths."
"!! The Smiths?! Why didn't you tell me before that you know them?"
"Well, I just know one of them really; he's a friend of a friend."
It turned out that the friend of a friend was not actually in The Smiths; he was the brother of Andy Rourke, the bass player. Ah, well, but there was that other woman I sat next to at your wedding who had once designed some limited edition Smiths t-shirts…
I think I may have already had this 12" single by the time you revealed that The Smiths were your mates. It's one of the rare cases where I remember thinking at the time I bought it, "This should be worth a lot of money one day." In that respect it seems to be a bit of a disappointment: whenever I check on MusicStack, the prices for this single seem to be fairly modest. Some Smiths records are very valuable, though. I know this because I heard Mike Joyce chatting on Marc Riley's radio programme, and he admitted that he'd been hard up after The Smiths split, and — when he heard how much some of the records were fetching — he got a couple of boxes of them out of his wardrobe and, with his wife, sold them anonymously to second-hand collectors' shops.
| Discogs entry for this 12" single |
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