John Peel 1939 - 2004

Only last week I thought to myself: ‘I must really make an effort to listen to John Peel again soon,’ after not tuning into his show for a long time. I had intended to do it this week, but I’m afraid I left it a little late. What a damn shame.

I can still clearly recall, when I was fourteen, traveling down with my parents by train from Norwich to London, to have a look around the HMS Belfast, which was docked in the Thames and had been recently opened to the public: my father had served on the battle cruiser during the Second World War. At Stowmarket, a market town in Suffolk, a long haired guy got on the train and sat a few seats down in the same carriage. I recognised him immediately as John Peel. I had been listening to his Radio 1 show Top Gear for about a year by then and started shifting around in my seat. I really wanted to go up and ask him to play a request but I was too shy. I kept thinking about my missed opportunity for the rest of the day.

Wind on to the summer of 81 and I was playing drums in a group, The Walking Floors, who were influenced by Television, Wire and 60s psychedelia. I had tuned into Peel who said, by way of introduction: “You go and get your show all sorted out and then some great singles arrive. Tonight we’ve got new releases by New Order, The Walking Floors…” I stopped listening at that point, rendered insensible with excitement, as a housemate, who was listening also, found out when he came into my room. We were played after The Birthday Party, who were in session that night. I was a student, but if I’d had a job I would have given it up. I’d heard myself on Peel and, in my naïve mindset of the time, that meant I’d made it. Well, anyway, we did get £20 each from the Performing Right Society for the broadcast.

A year on, someone from the group persuaded Peel to come out for a drink in London before one of his radio shows – we imagined we were his pals by now, but it was a big disappointment: he was irascible and truculent that evening. “I suppose you are going to want some beers,” he commented in his weariest, most lugubrious tones. We chatted for a while, bought him a drink and after less than an hour he got up to go. “I suppose you are going to ply me with a demo tape,” he accurately predicted.

Peel was a major influence on anyone who had grown up listening to him, even if they didn’t hear all his shows. I recall recording Peel Sessions and listening to tapes made by friends – if you missed something, chances were that someone else had got it. These included crackers by This Heat, Gang Of Four, Joy Division, The Pop Group, oddities by Sudden Sway and countless others, including Viv Stanshall’s Sir Henry At Rawlinson End (never officially released, though widely circulated) series of playlets, which were sheer genius and continue to be a delight. I also recall lying shattered on my bed at my parents’ house in 1980 during vacation, after a day’s gruelling work on a farm, as he played a series of tracks from Doc At The Radar Station, his measured vocal cadences cracking slightly with excitement at the music he was about to share.

I had the great pleasure of going around to his house in Great Finborough in 94 to put him through his paces in The Wire magazine’s blindfold test, Invisible Jukebox. I got off at Stowmarket and he came to pick me up in his car. On the way to his house he told me that he’d always measured his life in how many more Fall albums he would get to hear, but didn’t know how many more of those there would be. I thought this an odd way to kick off the conversation with an almost perfect stranger, but this might have been about the time he became ill with what turned out to be late-onset diabetes. I reminded him of our previous encounter and he just smiled and chuckled slightly.

The time I spent with him (and his wife Sheila) consisted of a leisurely lunch with plenty of wine, while I played him the selections. I had always thought of him as sharp and witty in a wry, self-deprecating way, but one-to-one he was an absolutely wonderful raconteur. What sticks most in my mind is that he would start on one of his stories and look at me to see how I was responding. Once he saw that he had got me hooked, he gave me a hint of a half-wink and a half –smile, as if to say, “You think that’s funny? There’s a lot more where that came from”. His speech would get just slightly more animated as he moved in for the kill. His story of Stackwaddy, a group of piss-artist wasters – including an army deserter who wore a “ludicrous wig” to hide his short hair – that he signed to his Dandelion label in the early 70s was a peach. Peel had somehow managed to cajole Jack Holzmann, president of Elektra to one of their shows. The onstage shambles, which he recounted with great relish, culminated in said vocalist getting his dick out and pissing on the audience from the stage, His description of the horror on Holzmann’s face made me laugh so hard I felt that I was on the edge of losing consciousness.

In 1995 I was starting off the enormously long task of writing my Beefheart biography. The following year I went over again to Peel Acres and he gave me an illuminating interview about Don, the band, and his role in bringing them over to the UK in 68, when he drove them around from show to show. “If you’re good, I’ll make you a copy of their concert at Frank Freeman’s Dancing School in Kidderminster,” he said, in his typically avuncular way: this was the recording that surfaced on the Grow Fins box set. Again, during the interview, he could see when he’d ‘got’ me and purred up through the conversational gears. My favourite of all his Beefheart anecdotes is the famous ‘Listening To A Tree’ tale. To those who haven’t read it, here it is. It sounded better spoken, but is worth reading.

“When we were coming back from Frank Freeman’s, he [Van Vliet] asked if he could listen to a tree. I’ve always thought that’s a really strange thing to have done, but of course it could have been his way of saying that he wanted a pee – probably was. He might have said ‘listen to a tree’, because it rhymed with ‘having a pee’. His thought processes were not like those of other men – you could well believe that he wanted to listen to a tree.

“If anybody else had said it, I would have said ‘stupid bastard’ under my breath. But with Beefheart you thought, well, he knows more than I do and if he wants to listen to a tree, and I’m in a position to enable him to do so, then I’m going to give him a chance to do it, because it would be quite wrong not to. So he got out of the car and disappeared. It was one of those things where Pete Frame ought to have arranged for a plaque to be put there. Beefheart probably just went and had a pee, I don’t know. Or he may have just listened to a tree. I’d like to say that I can see him silhouetted against a gibbous moon with his ear firmly pressed to a fine old elm, but I just don’t know.”

Peel also happily agreed to write a foreword to the book but when the time came, he was frustratingly quiet on the subject. I corresponded with him on other matters and he would reply that he was really looking forward to the book, but when I tried to get him to confirm if he would do it or not – as publication date was looming – I heard nothing back. I surmise that he had thought it a good idea at the time, but ultimately didn’t want to endorse the book. This was also about the time that Don got back in touch with him. After more than 25 years of silence, he called Peel when he had heard that Sheila was unwell. In 2002 a friend bumped into him on Stowmarket station and Peel said that Don had called him on his birthday that year and sung Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen” to him over the phone, which had pleased him immensely

In our current cultural climate, the death of someone significant seems to get a lot of people a little overheated emotionally – just remember the business over Princess Diana. But talking to a number of people between 24 and 60 – and my 80 year old mother - in the last day or so, the loss of John Peel leaves a massive gap, Who could ever replace him?

A friend of mine is a guitarist in a band who were offered a Peel session in December 2004 and the contract came through just before he died. She was very sad about Peel’s demise and understandably gloomy about about the fate of the session. “But if the contract has come through it would probably still be on,” I said, trying to be helpful. “It won’t be the same, though,” she replied.

I recall Peel said to me, “People ask me, ‘What was the best year for the music?’ I always say: ‘This year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year’.” I didn’t know whether I believed that he really meant it, but it clearly showed how he was driven to seek out new music, not to wallow in nostalgia. I now hold the selfsame view, more or less, although I know it is an opnion that had been formed by him. He also said to me something that struck a deeper chord: “I like to be in the position where I play something and I don’t even know if it’s good or not”. That is the perfect description of that itch you get when you play, say, Trout Mask Replica for the first time. (Even Peel thought that Beefheart had ‘blown it’ when he first heard.) When this happens, you simply haven’t the terms of reference; or if you have, you don’t see how the music fits into them; or if it does, it doesn’t fit comfortably. Most of the albums I like best initially prompted this kind of reaction. Once you’ve figured it out, then you get a new kind of delight. I guess Peel was addicted to this state of mind and was effectively asking the listener: “I like this (I think) and I haven’t been instructed or obliged to play it from a play list. What do you think? Is it any good?”

Some of his choices were baffling; some were amazing, others quite awful and a typical Peel show visited all points in between. But it’s good at times to listen to music you might not like, rather than just take the aural palliative dished out by many radio stations. The soothing sounds of Classic FM, are the ultimate example and the aural conveyor belt of mass-produced consumer fodder that feeds the charts and daytime radio isn’t so far behind. This might go some way to explaining the unique example of a man moving from middle-aged to elderly, while playing the rawest punk rock and grunge, the lowest Lo-Fi, the hardest Drum ‘N’ Bass, the most minimal German techno and so on.

And lest we forget, he was one of the first DJs to play roots reggae and dub in the 70s, and continued to do so even after getting death threats from the National Front. He told me that he had received letters saying, ‘I know where your children go to school,’ which accompanied the turds that were sent to him through the post. Even that didn’t stop him. Let’s hope there aren’t too many smarmy eulogies from the BBC, either, as they seem to have been trying to marginalise him for at least the last 30 years.

In 1994 I was, I think, the first UK journalist to write an interview feature on the groundbreaking German electronica group Oval for The Wire. ‘The guy who broke Oval,’ as the editor joked. But where did I hear them first? On John Peel, of course.

He was a Wizard and a True Star, and although I barely knew him, I miss him dearly.

RIP