John Peel Rip

[oldboy]

music pioneer - not sure if exBrits have heard of him?

dies today on holiday after a heart attack

 

[Shade]

Terribly sad, though I suppose if you've gotta go, a heart attack isn't the worst way. I never listened to John Peel's radio show but always enjoyed his appearances on other things as he was so funny and dry. I can hear his voice now. I remember him talking in Simon Garfield's excellent book The Nation's Favourite about the Radio 1 Christmas parties, where everyone - in Peel's words - would fight with one another to avoid sitting next to Simon Bates.

 

[Stewart]

There will be no Festive Fifty this year...

 

[Shade]

More John Peel stuff. From a piece in the Guardian a couple of years ago:

In recent years, the former John Peel Roadshow - A Man and a Box of Records - has lain pretty much dormant in front of the TV, but there was a time when it was out and about two or three nights a week, driving its Land Rover from polytechnic to polytechnic, sleeping in lay-bys, earning six or seven hundred pounds a night playing records from the Box to resentful students who wanted chart hits and beer-drinking competitions. In my own defence, I always warned the resentful students what to expect. "I'm going to play records you don't like very much for an hour or so," I told them. "Then I'm going to walk away with my pockets bulging with your money." This admittedly high-risk strategy usually paid off, although I twice had to be rescued from whatever is the opposite of fans by the police.

Speaking in Simon Garfield's aforementioned The Nation's Favourite:

As a Radio 1 DJ you were expected to do ludicrous things. We had these Radio 1 funweeks, which usually consisted of travelling the country with a bunch of other DJs and Noel Edmonds filling people's hotel rooms with chickens. In more enlightened days than ours you'd be burnt at the stake for doing that. There was always a lot of shouting and showing off - awful events.

But these things did have compensations. Perhaps the best moment for me took place in a multi-storey hotel in Birmingham, in something called The Dickens Bar, lots of dark-wood booths full of people who no doubt travelled around the country selling Dickens bars to other hotels. Tony Blackburn got up with Paul Williams, a Radio 1 producer who used to play the piano tolerably well, and sang for about half an hour. There was massive indifference to his efforts, if not downright hostility, yet he went through the whole thing as if he was Barry Manilow at the Copacabana, as if everyone was absolutely adoring everything he did. He soared in my estimation after that. I thought, He's not such a tosser after all.

People like Mike Read and DLT would often complain that they couldn't go anywhere without being recognised, but of course would go everywhere in a tartan suit carrying a guitar, so they would have attracted attention in a lunatic asylum. In the streets of London people would go, "Who the **** is that? Isn't that that Mike Read bloke?"

On the way home from work today they had Noel Edmonds on Radio 4's PM, saying how John Peel used to "take the rip out of me unmercilessly." Unmercilessly... Noel the neologist.

Again from The Nation's Favourite:

In earlier days there were times when the senior management of Radio 1 seemed to be rather surprised that I walked upright and used knives and forks. I never saw my programmes as all that radical - more an alternative to what was on at other times of the day. But at one time I was regarded within the corridors of the BBC as being the Baader Meinhof Gang of British broadcasting, and treated with a certain amount of terror.

It used to be that we had a controller, name of Muggeridge, who was joint controller of Radio 1 and 2, quite a good idea. When the BBC was looking for the man to do the job they quite naturally chose someone who until that time had been head of the Chinese section of the BBC World Service. Once he had got the job he interviewed various DJs one after another, and I was last in. I think he thought I would do something unpredictable and startling, like rub heroin into the roots of his hair. He was sitting at his enormous desk, a sort of Dr Strangelove position. At some point in the conversation I mentioned public schools, and he brightened up a little at this idea, as if at some stage in my life I had actually met somebody who had been to a public school.

I said, "Actually, I went to one myself."

He went, "Extraordinary! Which one?"

He was assuming it was some minor public school somewhere on the south coast. I said, "Shrewsbury."

He said, "Good heavens!" At this stage he was getting quite elated. "Which house were you in?"

I told him, and he said, "How's old Brookie?"

It was clear that he thought, Whatever he looks like, and whatever sort of unspeakable music he plays on the radio, he is still one of us. I think for a long time it was this factor that sustained me at the BBC.

Brilliant. A sad loss.

 

[Freya]

Control yourself bobby...

 

[ControlArmsNow]

Cool guy; his influence on popular music in the UK was inestimable: His "sessions" were truly unique, giving exposure to some great bands who would never have got near our radios otherwise. He'll be missed in my house.

Peel quote: "We're not here to give people what they want, we're here to give people what they didn't know they wanted."

 

[blueboatdriver]

End of an era. John Peel rest in peace.
Just had to say it to someone other than my wife.
How right he was, "Teenage Kicks "has it all.

 

[Ou Be Low hoo]

JP was a legend in his own lifetime...Most of the songs he liked sounded weird, but he was one cool cucumber...RIP...he'll be mixin Hendrix, Lennon, Elvis and Marley altogether at his DJ booth in the ether...

 

[Halo]

I was sorry to hear this. I loved his dry wit and the fact that he promoted many excellent bands, including The Smiths, who owe him a huge debt.