A long time ago now, in 1968, when Radio 1 was still quite new and the music we liked to listen to was called "underground" or sometimes "west coast" but not yet "progressive", there was of course John Peel. Now Peel at that time was doing two shows on Radio 1. There was Top Gear on Sunday afternoons. The first one of these I heard featured music by The Doors, Tyrannosaurus Rex and what I remember - probably with the magic of thirty-three years of hindsight heavily upon it - as a fabulous performance of "Jabberwocky" by Boeing Duveen And The Beautiful Soup. He would also play music by the likes of Pentangle, Fleetwood Mac and the Free precursor Black Cat Bones. I'm pretty sure he played Deep Purple as well. Of its kind, all mainstream stuff. The other show was different. It was in a slot called Night Ride which ran, as you'd think, in the middle of the night. Peel did one of the mid-week programmes, and it was here that he used to play all the stuff that was just too weird or out of the way for the Sunday afternoon hippies. I remember hearing "A House Of Beauty" by Sun Ra, bits of Messiaen's "Turangalila Symphony" and... John Fahey. The first piece was something from The Transfiguration Of Blind Joe Death. It might have been "The Death Of Clayton Peacock"; it might have been something else. Whatever it was I was transfixed. I'd never heard anything like this before. The blues roots of Fahey's music just passed me by: I was fourteen and living in Cornwall and it sounded completely alien. It also sounded completely self-possessed. Funnily enough I still don't care about where Fahey got his ideas from. It occasionally surprises me, when I take the trouble to think about it, that I never bothered to root through his music looking for sources and influences and lines of evolution. It never seems to matter with him where the themes and ideas come from. He isn't playing the blues anyway, not in his mind and not with his hands. This is very personal music, formed out of and in the form of Fahey's own soul and intellect.

So anyway there I was, trying to stay awake in bed in St Austell listening to John Fahey on the radio. Of course, I couldn't buy The Transfiguration Of Blind Joe Death. I saw a copy though, in the window of Peter Russell's Hot Record Shop in Plymouth. I could hardly ever afford to buy domestically issued LPs, and Transfiguration was an import at twice the price. Still, I didn't forget. Later in the year, Peel on Night Ride played another Fahey track - "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible City Of Bladensburg" from The Yellow Princess. I'm listening to it now. The Yellow Princess was on Vanguard Records, which had a British distribution arrangement with Polydor, so this time there was a British release quite soon and a copy turned up in Peter Russell's. I've still got it. It's a bit crackly these days. Unlike most of Fahey's recorded material, "Bladensburg" isn't a solo performance. It also features Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes of the early Spirit on organ and bass, Matt Andes on electric guitar and Kevin Kelley, who had played with The Byrds and also with Gary Marker, on drums. Strangely enough, the CD that I'm listening to now calls it "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible City Of Bladensburg" on the outside cover but "Raga Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible City Of Bladensburg" on the inside. Two thirds of the nine tracks on The Yellow Princess are Fahey by himself, three at the beginning and three at the end, and the others are grouped in the middle.

The record starts with the title track. Fahey's notes describe it as a stablized improvisation on the main theme of a passage from "The Yellow Princess Overture" by Camille Saint-Saens. This is correct. After I'd been keeping a rather desultory eye out for years for a copy of that piece it turned up on the cover CD of an issue of "BBC Music" magazine. If you can get hold of that, by the way, the CDs often have quite interesting music on them. Don't bother about the magazine itself. It's trash. Anyway, Fahey's piece certainly is based on a section of Saint Saens' overture. It's surprising to hear those phrases played by an orchestra when for years and years you've heard them on Fahey's guitar. Next is "View (East From The Top Of The Riggs Road / B&O Trestle)". A railroad tune, in other words, but this one is a pastoral and it hasn't got a train in it. The third solo guitar piece in this group, "Lion", I think is the one which appears as "Tiger" on "Live In Tasmania". It's certainly a close cousin.

The next section starts with "March! For Martin Luther King", which is exactly what the title suggests. King had recently been murdered: this is a funeral march. In addition to Fahey's acoustic guitar we hear organ, electric bass and some over prominent and not particularly subtle drumming from Kevin Kelley. "The Singing Bridge Of Memphis, Tennessee" which follows is billed as a "concerto for guitar, singing bridge, electric bassoon and old phonograph record". A piece of collage featuring instruments and found or non-"musical" sounds, in other words. The bridge is of course a railroad bridge, this time with a train, and this piece is an example of the sort of thing Fahey liked to do with the facilities of a studio. It's somewhat calmer than some of his work in this vein - one could describe it as an "urban pastoral" - it sits well on the same record as "View". After "Bladensburg" - the last non-solo piece, we have two more memorial pieces: one, "Charles A Lee: In Memoriam", for the father of a friend, and one, "Irish Setter", for a dog. Finally, placed as the culmination of the work and featuring a compelling hymn chorale, there is "Commemorative Transfiguration And Communion At Magruder Park". This is Fahey at his most confident and didactic. Thoroughly in command of his instrument and his materials, he works through the piece to its climax without once letting the listener's attention slip, then takes it into silence. Alleluia. Alleluia.

Despite the middle section, you go away from The Yellow Princess with the impression of having listened to a record of a music which, despite its distinctiveness, is not as alien as all that. This isn't the case with City Of Refuge. It was recorded twenty-nine years after The Yellow Princess and after Fahey had passed through a number of vicissitudes. The Yellow Princess didn't compromise with the listener, but City Of Refuge wears its identity like a suit of armour. On the back cover Fahey invokes the name of his early alter ego, Blind Joe Death. It's positively the bleakest music that I've ever heard. "Fanfare" starts the record with a collage of sounds - including train sounds, so the effect at the very beginning is somewhat reminiscent of the opening of David Bowie's "Station To Station". After a series of other sounds including an electric organ and muffled voices, the train returns; its whistle blows, and a rough drone introduces Fahey's guitar. This is not the guitar pastoralism of The Yellow Princess. It's rough, distorted and agressive, and it has to compete with the drone which never goes completely away. That drone continues into "The Mill Pond", which begins with an exploration of the upper part of the guitar's range. Eventually only the drone remains, and then that finally fades away leaving at last silence into which Fahey plays "Chelsey Silver, Please Come Home". "Chelsey Silver, Please Come Home" is the piece on the album which comes closest to The Yellow Princess. The blues roots of much of Fahey's music are obvious on this track but although it is reminiscent of the earlier record it's a good deal edgier. Nowhere in City Of Refuge can you relax. "City Of Refuge I", which follows, reduces the emotional temperature still further. It consists of slightly over twenty minutes waiting in the mid-range of the guitar. Fahey here comes as close as anyone to being the Samuel Beckett of his instrument. "City Of Refuge III" is by comparison a party. The blues is back, but without the spikey energy of "Chelsey Silver". Here it chronicles time on the edge of despair. In "Hope Slumbers Eternal" Fahey's guitar rests against another drone, wavering slightly and less rough-edged than the one in the tracks which opened the record. One feels that Fahey is here accompanying the drone, not playing in front of it. The final piece, the nineteen and a half minute "On The Death And Disembowelment Of The New Age", returns to the collage territory of "Fanfare" - and of "The Singing Bridge Of Memphis, Tennessee". It isn't pretty and it isn't meant to be. If you don't like it then you don't deserve to like it.

And that's it. What do I think? I loved The Yellow Princess, but I love City Of Refuge more. What is good above all else in Fahey's music is that whatever he put into it, wherever he got it from, the result was recognisably his own. He got a lot from the blues, but you wouldn't say he was a blues guitarist. His collage pieces are his and his alone. It was his integrity and his ability to mould his materials to his purposes that made him the artist that he was. The man who produced "On The Death And Disembowelment Of The New Age" was not a man to compromise.