The funny thing about Randy is that he was such an unusual bloke. I thought I was the only person who felt like I did about about him. That presumption was blown apart by his funeral service, attended by 700 odd people.

I’ve made no secret to anybody that Randy Cozens changed my life; he was a mod of the old school, preaching a gospel of soul, soul and more soul. Before ‘Sounds’ published Randy’s Top Mod 100 in August 1979, all that the new generation of mods had to go on was The Who, The Jam and The Small Faces. We were so naive about the true modernist path that it just hadn’t occurred to us that there was anything else out there.

Randy changed our assumptions and was the most genuine and down to earth person that I’d ever met on the soul scene. For example, five or so years ago I mentioned to Randy the trouble I was having finding one of his tunes of is Top 100 list ... 3 days later his own copy arrive in the post. I was flabbergasted. I mean records (and their ownership) were the entire rason d’etre of our scene and here was someone giving me his own copy - the very copy he’d bought in 1965!

I thought that this was a one off until a couple of weeks later I was relaying the story to DJ Terry Jones who told me the exact same thing had happened to him. It seemed that all you had to do was tell Randy you liked a track and he sent you his own copy!

The just don’t make them like that anymore.

Eddie Piller