John Peel 1939 - 2004

In the early 90s a discussion raged in Steal Softly Thru Snow Beefheart fanzine about the legandary CB & the MB gig in Frank Freeman's School Of Dancing, Kidderminster, which took place in 1968.

Did Peel tape it or didn't he? That was the question...

I thought "well it's John Peel, you can write and ask him...". So I dashed off a little note explaining about the magazine, and asking if he could just let me know if he taped the gig or not so we could put this conjecture to bed. 

About 6 weeks passed and I heard nothing, then one day a small package arrived with BBC stickers. "What the hell is that?" thought I.

Mr Peel had very kindly run me off a tape of the Kidderminster gig, and had appended a  small note of his own. 

"Hear this and melt" it said, which I promptly did. 

With agreement from JP and via SSTS's Colin David Webb, this work was discreetly introduced into the Beefheart tape-trading network, in such a way as to preclude any financial gain. (I remember reading somewhere on www.beefheart.com  that it was later er, "bootlegged somewhat superfluously" I think the expression was).

A few years later John Peel visited Newport's Legendary TJs nightclub (he himself was responsible for the "Legendary" bit, in frequent gig announcements, long before he'd ever set foot in the place) and he spent the entire occasion pressing the flesh  (unlike when Steve Lamacq turned up a few years later and was all but ignored). 

I was walking along the street and espied the great man coming my way. I walked up to him, shook his hand and said "thank you for the Beefheart tape". His face lit up "Oh of course!" he said and we had a little chat about it being clandestinely passed from fan-to-fan, a fact which he obviously took a mischievous delight in.

Unlike many, I actually did listen to Peel from early days almost to the end (apart from the last few weeks when the sound of my computer has been buggered), and every once in a while I'd e-mail him praising something-or-other or informing him about something he'd enquired about, and once or twice he read these out with a cheery "hey good to hear from you". 

I met him once, for about three minutes, and I sure do miss him. I'd like to say I thought of him as a friend but you ever tried getting a friend to copy a tape for you?