John Peel

Some of this piece is taken from a posting from 2 years ago just after he died...but it still needs saying.

Most of the music that I like today can be traced back to teenage evenings spent listening to John Peel’s radio show and to the attitude that he brought to music. He didn’t over analyse it in musical terms, but looked for and played the music that interested and excited him and was preferably new…and preferably the B-side. And when there were records from his past or those that gave him an emotional response, then he’d tell the listener. Music is massively important and needs sharing, and people use it to reflect and make sense of their lives.

My musical education really started with his show. I was 13 in 1977 and I used to tape it on an old reel-to-reel tape, with a mic against the radio. I can remember hearing The Ramones Sheena is a Punk Rocker and the Clash Capitol Radio for the first time and also a Stranglers session that included Hanging Around. We’d talk about the records he’d played the night before on the bus going to school. My friends and I used to laugh when he played records at the wrong speed/wrong side or twice in a row. I stopped laughing eventually but he still did it.

When my rocking band, Onionhead, released Electric Ladland in 1990, I sent a copy to him with a chatty letter about the Gang of Four, Blue Orchids and The Fall. (In fact most of the letters I still write are about those 3 bands….much to the consternation of the BT and British Gas, who would rather I sent cash or cheques) Some time later I was summoned to the phone with the words “Sammy …it’s John Peel for you”. He’d phoned to say that he’d already got a copy of Ladland, didn’t think he liked it but he would listen to it again. Class. But the main reason for the call was to relay the information that the (superior) session versions of Fall songs that later turned up on Grotesque were not being released on Strange Fruit because Mark E Smith wasn’t happy with the recordings. Obviously it would have been better if Peel had said he loved our songs and wanted us to do a session, but I still thought the phone call was a measure of his all round greatness and proof that he was ultimately a music fan. He was a fan who knew some information that he thought another fan needed to know. It’s a beautiful thing played out on a daily basis in record shops, pubs, gigs and chatrooms.


A few days later he sent me a Peter Powell postcard (autographed by the Powellster) with the topical news that Sid James daughter had been one of the women on the cover of Hendrix’s original Electric Ladyland.

He also phoned my friend Nick before he was Onionhead manager, and was in fact a celeb-pestering schoolboy on a day trip to London. Nick and his mates found Peelie sheltering from the rain in Covent Garden and told him they were in a band and on the up. A year later Peel phoned Nick to check their progress. As there had been neither band nor progress they talked about football instead.

You had to love him for making the effort really. Apparently he kept all the numbers he was given. And he actually tried to listen to the tens of thousands of demos that he was sent, partly out of a sense of guilt, partly because this was what set him apart from other Radio 1 DJ’s (he particularly loathed Dave Lee Travis) but also in case he missed something.

There is a (no doubt apocryphal) story about him going to Dave Lee Travis’s house and after noting that there weren’t any records in the house DLT responded “But they attract dust”. Peel on the other hand had an extension built to for his records.

So many of the thing’s that he played ended up as being amongst my favourites, The Undertones, The Fall, and even though I thought I’d found Country Soul for myself, he played it too.

I liked his phrasing and descriptions too. “The John Peel Wing Ding” (not as rude as it sounds), “The Mighty Fall.” His love of Liverpool FC was so intense that he’d “Take in washing for the club.” He described taking Acid with Marc Bolan on a boat on the Serpentine as being something that he was glad he’d done but didn’t necessarily want to do again, “A bit like going to Stratford on Avon.” When Ride a White Swan reached number 1 Bolan phoned him to say “John…I’m Britain’s best selling poet”

Peel’s contribution had been to play awkward music and to challenge the listener. The Peel sessions especially in the years before cheap recording technology were often the only way many bands would get in the studio. Many of the session versions were actually better than the album versions as the limited studio time available meant that there was less time for indulgence. Sometimes it was just that the engineers knew the studios and equipment so well that they could get the basic sound right more quickly and then concentrate on getting the essence of the band. And then sometimes they just sounded better… like The Peel session versions of material that would later crop up on Siouxsie and The Banshees debut or The Smiths This Charming Man.

I grew up with his show and musically he shaped not only me, but 2 generations and he gave a natural home to music that was new, difficult, perverse and sometimes just excellent. For much of the time the BBC didn’t know what to do with him and although the 90’s saw some shuffling time slots, he was essentially left to get on with it. Thankfully.

The changing nature of the media, cheaper technology, the internet, more broadcasting time and more channels means that there is (on the face of it) more room for music and more room for unorthodox presenters. But it also means that there isn’t that central focus that The John Peel Show provided. A new band you saw could have had a string of Peel sessions but have had no records released. Yet you could still see them, read about them in the weekly music press and hear them on Peel. Music is now on the one hand more controlled and managed by the industry but also, outside of that world, it’s more fragmented. It’s simultaneously easier to get your stuff out….but harder to get enough people to hear it within a short time span. For music to capture the moment it needs that momentum.

We can all be bloggers and podcasters now. After all if you’ve got a PC, you can do it. It is the modern equivalent of the Punk commandment. “Here are 3 chords, now form a band.” Record your song, post it on the net. Like that one, well listen to this, like her My Space page well look at his. “Eeh, It used to be all Arctic Monkeys and Lilly Allen when I were a lad”

But even if the ways of getting to music are changing, there would still have been a place for Peel because he was proof that you could grow up and grow old with new music and still keep your own world view. We’ve all got our own personal Dave Lee Travis’s that we don’t want to turn into. Peel was one of the good guys and I miss the John Peel Show and I miss John Peel.