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John Peel

John Peel on the front cover of the Radio Times, celebrating his 60th birthday in 1999

John Peel (30 August 1939 – 25 October 2004) was a presenter on BBC Radio 1. He joined the Radio 1 when it launched in 1967 and was still a presenter on the station when he died in 2004. Known for the extraordinary range of his taste in music and the occasional mistakes (such as playing records at the wrong speed) that marked his shows, John Peel was one of the most popular and respected DJs in the United Kingdom. His influence on alternative rock, pop, and dance music is widely acknowledged as being incalculably large.

Early life

Peel was born as John Ravenscroft in Heswall in the Wirral, near Liverpool, the son of an upper middle class cotton merchant, and educated as a boarder at Shrewsbury School. His housemaster, R. H. J. Brooke, whom Peel described as "extraordinarily eccentric" and "amazingly perceptive", wrote on one of his school reports:

"Perhaps it's possible that John can form some kind of nightmarish career out of his enthusiasm for unlistenable records and his delight in writing long and facetious essays."

After finishing his National Service in 1959 he went to the United States and first worked for WRR Radio in Dallas, Texas. While there he attended the arraignment of Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before Oswald's assassination. He later worked for KOMA in Oklahoma City and KMEN in San Bernardino, California.

Beginning of British career

He returned to England in 1967 to work for the offshore pirate radio station Wonderful Radio London. He was offered the midnight-to-two shift, which developed into a program called The Perfumed Garden (named after an erotic book famous at the time). It was on "Big L" that he first adopted the name John Peel.

John Peel brought sixties culture to a generation of young Londoners through his Perfumed Garden on Wonderful Radio London, playing classic blues and folk music as he gently introduced groundbreaking music of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Captain Beefheart, esoteric performers like Ron Geesin and John Fahey, and broke new British bands like Family and Fairport Convention. His show influenced the rise of most subsequent styles of rock music.

Wonderful Radio London closed on August 14, 1967 at 3pm just before the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act became law at midnight. The new law made offshore broadcasting illegal.

BBC career

BBC Radio 1

When Wonderful Radio London closed down on August 14, 1967, John Peel joined the BBC's new pop music station, Radio 1, which began broadcasting the following month. Unlike Big L, Radio 1 was not a full-time station, but a hybrid of recorded music and live studio orchestras broadcast at the same time as the talk and light music of BBC Radio 2. The pirate stations had been successful partly because they played records continuously, but the BBC was gagged by a Musician's Union and record company restriction called Needle Time. While The Perfumed Garden had been spontaneously produced and introduced by John Peel, BBC regulations demanded that Peel anchor a show produced by John Walters called Top Gear. Peel recalled:

"I was one of the first lot on Radio 1 and I think it was mainly because ... Radio 1 had no real idea what they were doing so they had to take people off the pirate ships because there wasn't anybody else."

From the start Peel displayed his eclectic and avant-garde taste in music. He was largely responsible for introducing BBC listeners to punk rock, reggae and hip-hop. In 1973 he played both sides of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in full, and helped establish Richard Branson's Virgin music label. Peel championed the long-running Manchester band The Fall, who played 24 sessions for the show, including one on Peel's 60th birthday. He once liked a Cocteau Twins album so much that he played a whole side, non-stop, without interruption. His avant-garde musical tastes brought him into conflict with other more conservative DJs at the BBC such as Tony Blackburn and Simon Bates, and he remained a dominant force in independent music, both in the UK and across Europe, until his death. His radio show was latterly sometimes broadcast from his home, named "Peel Acres", in Suffolk and had a homely air, with his wife, Sheila, whom he affectionately referred to as The Pig (because of her laugh) and his daughter, Flossie, often being involved or at least mentioned.

An annual tradition of the show was the Festive Fifty — a countdown of the best tracks of the year as voted for by the listeners. Despite Peel's eclectic playlist, the Festive Fifty tended to be composed largely of "white boys with guitars," in Peel's words. This frustrated Peel somewhat, and in 1991 he went so far as to cancel the rundown. Topped inevitably by Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", this Phantom Fifty was eventually broadcast at the rate of one track per programme, some years later. The 1997 chart was, unusually, a Festive Thirty-One.

There is a happy hardcore track entitled "John Peel is Not Enough" by the artist CLSM. Peel was so impressed by it that not only did he play it on his show several times, but dedicated an entire show to happy hardcore, in hopes that it could spawn its own show. Peel also championed a wealth of other musical genres from reggae to death metal.

Many bands and artists of many different musical styles from different decades credit Peel as a major boost to their careers, the list includes T-Rex, David Bowie, The Faces, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Napalm Death, The Undertones, Buzzcocks, The Cure, Joy Division, Pulp, Orbital, The Smiths and The White Stripes. Peel's reputation as the most important DJ breaking unsigned acts into the mainstream was such that in 1983 unsigned artist Billy Bragg drove to the Radio 1 studios with a mushroom biryani and a copy of his record after hearing Peel mention that he was hungry, the subsequent airplay launching his career.

Peel remained on Radio 1 for 37 years, until his death in 2004. Coincidently, the last track he played on his final show was "Time 4 Change" from the album No One's Listening Anymore (by Klute).

BBC World Service

In addition to his Radio 1 show, he broadcast as a disc jockey on the BBC World Service, 30 years on the British Forces Broadcasting Service BFBS, VPRO Radio3 in the Netherlands, and on Radio Eins in Germany. His audience also broadened to include listeners around the world listening to internet audio broadcasts.

BBC Television

In 1969, John acted as chauffeur to Captain Beefheart on his UK tour. He was an occasional presenter of Top of the Pops on BBC One from the late 1960s until the 1990s. In 1971 he appeared not as presenter but performer, alongside Rod Stewart and The Faces, pretending to play mandolin on "Maggie May."

Peel, as the most senior and well known "alternative" DJ often presented the BBC's television coverage of music events, notably Glastonbury Festival.

Later years

In his later years Peel appeared to mellow somewhat. Between 1995 and 1997 he presented a show about children, called Offspring, on BBC Radio 4. In 1998 Offspring grew into the magazine-style documentary show Home Truths. When he took on the job presenting the programme, which is about everyday life in British families, Peel requested that it be free from celebrities, as he found real life stories more entertaining. Home Truths was described by occasional stand-in presenter John Walters as being "about people who had fridges called Renfrewshire". He also made regular contributions to BBC Two's humorous look at the irritations of modern life, "Grumpy Old Men".

In the 1970s John and his wife Sheila moved to a thatched cottage in a small village near Stowmarket in Suffolk, starting a family of four children. In the eight-acre garden, referred to on the radio as Peel Acres, he housed his record collection, estimated by then to be in the hundreds of thousands, in a number of barns and stables. In his later years Peel presented many of his radio shows from a studio at Peel Acres.

Peel was in demand as a voice-over artist for television documentaries, such as BBC One's "A Life of Grime", and advertisements, though he reportedly refused to work on adverts for products that he didn't use himself.

Peel was 11 times Melody Maker's DJ of the year, Sony Broadcaster of the Year in 1993, winner of the Godlike Genius Award from the NME in 1994, Sony Gold Award winner in 2002 and is a member of the Radio Academy Hall of Fame. At the NME awards in 2005 he was Hero of the Year and was posthumously given a special award for "Lifelong Service To Music". At the same event the "John Peel Award For Musical Innovation" was awarded to The Others. He gained several honorary degrees including two doctorates and an honorary fellowship of Liverpool John Moores University. He was appointed an OBE in 1998, for his services to music.

In April 2003 the publishers Transworld successfully wooed Peel with a package worth up to £1.6 million for his autobiography, having placed an advert in a national newspaper aimed only at Peel. The planned release date was in 2005.

Peel was diagnosed with diabetes in 2001 and two weeks before his death he told friend and colleague Andy Kershaw that the move of his show, in summer 2004, back an hour from a 10pm start to 11pm, caused him a lot of stress and that he felt marginalised and unappreciated.

Peel died suddenly at the age of 65 from a heart attack on October 25, 2004, on a working holiday in the Inca city of Cuzco in Peru. Shortly after the announcement of his death, tributes began to arrive from fans and supporters both in and out of public life. Among the first to pay their respects were artists including Blur, Oasis, and New Order. Prime Minister Tony Blair also paid tribute.

On October 26, 2004 Radio 1 cleared its schedules to broadcast a day of tributes, while BBC THREE added a small and discreet caption to its logo: "Dedicated to John Peel". A stage for new bands at the Glastonbury Festival, previously known simply as 'The New Tent' has been renamed 'The John Peel Stage'.

John's funeral, on November 12, 2004, in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, was attended by thousands of people from around the world including artists he had championed. Eulogies were read by his brother, Alan Ravenscroft, and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini. The service ended with clips of him talking about his life, and his favourite song, "Teenage Kicks" was played. In 2001 Peel had told The Guardian that, apart from his name, all he wanted on his gravestone were some of the lyrics from this track: "Teenage Dreams, So Hard To Beat".

External links

• John Peel Radio 1 minisite (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/johnpeel/index.shtml)
• BBC Radio 4 biography (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/presenters/peel_biog.shtml)
• DJ History (http://www.djhistory.com/djhistory/archiveInterviewDisplay.php?interview_id=43) - An interview with John Peel

Obituaries

• BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3955369.stm)
• The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/johnpeel/story/0,15271,1336799,00.html)
• The NME (http://www.nme.co.uk/news/110322.htm)
• The Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1329902,00.html)

Some or all material in this page has been adapted from the John Peel entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Peel), or others, in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), the free encyclopedia.