(A very interesting article by Trevor Dann, who was a producer, and later
head of production, at Radio 1)

The Independent
29 October 2004

John Peel was a broadcasting legend. But his colleague Trevor Dann remembers
him as a friend, a family man and a lifelong Liverpool supporter

It was like meeting the Pope, or at least the Maharishi. There we were, my
friend Alan and I, two 15-year-olds queuing up to greet the great man, our
hero, our mentor, our spiritual guide. As fervent listeners to the pirate
Radio London, we'd learnt everything from John Peel.

We recorded The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album when he played it all the way
through without speaking. We'd gazed at the stars when he told us to, and
thought good thoughts so we could change the world. He'd introduced us to
Captain Beefheart, Jefferson Airplane and The Doors.

And yet here was the apotheosis of counterculture opening a summer
garden-party at a girls' school in rural Derbyshire. He was in late Sixties
uniform - the tie-dye T-shirt, cotton loons and plimsolls - while the school
governors and the parents buzzed around in their suits and twinsets,
clucking disapprovingly. Years later, he blinked in that beguiling way he
had and told me why he'd gone there. "Well, Trevor, when you're on board a
ship with nothing but blokes for company, an invitation to visit a girls'
school is, er, quite irresistible."

He signed my copy of the programme for the fête that day - "Love & peace,
John Peel". I treasured it, and still do. But he was dismissive when I took
it into Radio 1 a decade or so later. By then, I was a new radio producer
and he was the venerable BBC institution who'd renounced hippiedom and
embraced the energy and attitude of punk. "I used to talk a lot of ********
in those days," he said.

John and I didn't get off to the best start at Radio 1. In my first week, I
went up to the Broadcasting House continuity suite where he presented his
late-night show and asked if I could watch. I didn't know that he hated what
he called "broadcasting in a zoo". To make amends I got him a coffee and
placed it on the desk as he leant to one side to cue up a record. As he
straightened up his elbow knocked the coffee all over the faders,
necessitating a rapid switch to the next studio.

Minutes later, his wife arrived. Cue another howler. "You must be Shirley,"
I ventured. They both laughed. I felt very uncomfortable. "No, this is
Sheila," Peel said. But why had my simple mistake had such an effect? Some
days later, he explained that Shirley was the name of his first wife, an
American woman who Peel always claimed had beaten him up and then pursued
him to Britain, where he was taking refuge with Sheila.

One of the few consolations of the tragic news from Peru this week was that
Sheila was there with him. He was devoted to the Pig, as he always called
her, and he wore a silver ring with a pig on it. In fact, I think John
defined himself more as parent and husband than a broadcaster. In spite of
his acid tongue, he was a sentimental man who'd blub at the drop of a hat,
especially at family successes.

It was one of the many contradictions in Peel's life that the man who sought
out angry, urban music in some of the seedier inner-city clubs lived an
idyllic rural life in an isolated Suffolk cottage. From the splendidly named
Nan Trues Hole - truly John's bolt hole - no other building is visible. In
recent years, the BBC allowed him to broadcast his show via an ISDN line
from home. He began to sound like the religious leader he was to so many of
us, letting fall his pearls of wisdom from a musical Eden.

In 1983, I produced "the Peel show", as it was always called, for a few
months before leaving for television. I made one change. John Walters and
Chris Lycett, my predecessors, had allowed Peel to choose all his own music,
but they had retained the right to assemble the tracks into a running order.
In some cases, this amounted to no more than finding two songs with the same
word in the title and putting them together so John could do a DJ-style
link. Which, of course, he never did. So I suggested that he should do the
running order in future. He looked at me with the grateful eyes of a kid
meeting Santa and thanked me as effusively as if I'd given him a new toy.

I loved the opening to his show in those days. In would come the low
dum-da-dum of Grinderswitch's "Picking the Blues", and after the slide
guitar figure we'd be treated to the usual litany of awkward and
unpronounceable band names. Regular listeners may have noticed that, for
pure devilment, John would sometimes trail a band who didn't exist - "...
and the Flying Creamshots in session". He'd seen the phrase in a Dutch porno
mag.

He loved Holland, and regularly hosted the Pink Pop Festival. He claimed
that the Dutch liked him because his name translates as John Prick. Like
many of John's anecdotes it may not have been strictly true, but somehow
details like that never mattered. It was just a joy to listen to his fund of
stories. Life had a knack of happening to John. He always cast himself as
the unworldly ingénue at large in a cruel and unforgiving world.

Also in 1983, Radio 1 was staging a week's programming from Liverpool and
someone suggested that Peel and I should make an introductory show about his
home city. Persuading him to depart from the safety of the studio was a
nightmare, but once he'd agreed (with the condition that his daughter and
her teenage Goth friend could accompany us), he created a magical programme.

From the passenger seat of our hired car, he guided the two girls and me
around the streets of Liverpool, pointing out the key landmarks of his early
life. "That's where I saw my first gig. Eddie Cochran wasn't it, oh no, it
was the Obernkirchen Children's Choir singing 'Val deri, val dera'!" And:
"There's the Royal Insurance where brother Frank works." And: "That's the
train that takes the rich people to Heswall."

And thence to Anfield, home of his beloved Liverpool FC. He took me on the
Kop - all standing and swaying in those days - and I recorded his thoughts
and reactions to an FA Cup tie against unfancied Brighton. Liverpool
famously lost that day, so I got nothing at all out of John except a few
grunts, and nothing from the Kop characters apart from a wet trouser-leg
thanks to the inebriated Scouser behind me who couldn't be bothered to fight
his way to the gents.

The following morning we met Kenny Dalglish, Peel's absolute hero, for a
pre-arranged interview. Dalglish gave the usual pat footballer's answers to
some questions about the game, and Peel was still so depressed about the
match that he couldn't bring himself to conduct a proper interview. In the
end I had to ask the questions, and we dubbed in some commentary later.

That Merseyside expedition was also notable for the teenage scally John had
found to talk to us about being young in Liverpool in the Eighties. We met
on an estate in a pub that I thought was called The Chester, but turned out
be The Jester. And we listened to tales of burglary, football violence and
routine drug-use from a thoroughly engaging lad I thought no more of until I
saw The Farm singing "All Together Now" on Top of the Pops. It was Peter
Hooton, their lead singer. Once again, Peel the talent-spotter had been
ahead of his time.

He liked to use a football metaphor when talking about his appetite for new
music. Of course he was proud of Liverpool FC's championships and European
Cups, but "I'm much more interested in what happens on Saturday". He found
something life-affirming in the quest for novelty and the refusal to look
back.

When I was producing his Radio 1 show, I asked him to play the occasional
old record to help to introduce his young audience to some of the acts he
had championed in the past. I argued that Smiths fans might be interested in
Van Morrison or Tim Buckley if they were introduced to them by John Peel.
But he would have none of it. The two hours of airtime he had every day were
too precious to devote to anything other than the latest sounds from the
streets, pubs and bedrooms, and from teenage Britain.

In the Eighties, I was asked to write a profile of John for a newspaper. He
was a reluctant interviewee, but I managed to cobble together what I thought
was a reasonable piece. When it appeared, though, he was cross with me for
drawing attention to his love of driving. He didn't think it was a big part
of his life, even though he spent hours at the wheel and refused to fly
until only a few years ago.

I'd spent hours debating with him the fastest way to London from Suffolk. I
was an advocate of the A10; he preferred the A505 right round Royston to the
A1. For weeks, he would keep me informed of various time trials he'd done
using different routes, all proving that he was right in the first place.
How silly that we should waste so much time on something so trivial, but
that was John; once the bee was in the bonnet, it just kept buzzing.

The Peel/Walters office at Egton House, the old home of Radio 1, was a
shambles, hung with Christmas cards from decades earlier and packed to the
ceiling with tapes and vinyl. Walters was the untidiest man in the BBC, and
would never have survived in the era of open-plan offices. Peel and their
faithful secretary Sue (known as Brian, in a spiffing chaps' wheeze kind of
way) kept on at him, but nothing changed.

So John had to sit on his record case or the floor because there was no room
for a chair. This became even more ludicrous when John had one of his famous
early evening naps. The door would closegently, and the greatest living DJ
would snore through two hours, wrapped around a desk leg, a bin and a pile
of NMEs.

When I arrived back at Radio 1 in 1995 as the head of production, with a
brief to overhaul the music policy and the on-air sound of the station, Peel
was as comfortable as I'd ever seen him with the BBC management. The
pop'n'prattlers were on their way out, and the new controller, Matthew
Bannister, had endeared himself to Peel by making all sorts of public
statements about his support for new music. I remember Peel and Andy Kershaw
talking about Bannister on the radio and saying: "Well, we're safe - one day
Radio 1 will sound like our shows all day long."

But John's unease with management resurfaced when the axe started to fall on
people he liked. He got quite angry with me about the departure of one
producer he was particularly fond of, and he took on the mantle of a
stubborn trade-union leader arguing, in effect, that all change at Radio 1
was a bad thing. Underneath that friendly grumpy-old-man exterior lurked a
genuine grumpy old man.

When asked about his favourite record in the 1970s, he used to talk about
Link Wray's dirty and foreboding guitar solo "Rumble" and T Rex's "Ride a
White Swan". He delighted in the story that when Marc Bolan made No 1 for
the first time, Peel had been driving in his car and had to pull over on to
the hard shoulder as his eyes filled with tears.

But for many years his choice of best record ever was "Teenage Kicks" by The
Undertones, I think because it reminded him of what music is there for. Once
he'd kicked the somnambulism of the acid and dope years and rediscovered
beer (he always credited The Faces for re-energising him in the early
Seventies), he espoused music that celebrated youth and vigour.

John Peel won hundreds of awards. But he was a genuinely reluctant
celebrity; he hated what fame did to people and he had no truck with the
insincerity of showbiz hangers-on. In fact, I've no doubt that if he knew
that I, or indeed anyone outside a close circle of family and friends, was
writing about him, he'd be coming after me with a meat cleaver. I can hear
him saying so.

I was in Berlin when I heard the shocking news of John's death. Even the
teletext in my hotel room put the news on their front page, which gives some
indication of his worldwide reputation. Since Tuesday morning when the news
broke (although it had been embargoed until 2pm), I've received dozens of
texts and e-mails from friends who've been touched by the great man. One
came from an old friend I haven't seen in more than 20 years. "You told me
so many funny, warm stories about John," she wrote, "that I felt I knew him
a bit, too, and I was thrilled when he gave me a big smile and a good
morning in Diss last April." John had that effect on people. He made you
feel better.

He became a broadcasting icon because he had no artifice, no style, no
shtick. What you got the across the table at an Indian restaurant was what
you got on the radio: passion, honesty and an understated facility for
language. Younger broadcasters described as the new John Peel have come and
gone for 40 years, but the original was always the best.

Peel Unplugged

No one summed up John Peel better than Peel himself. While researching a
book about Radio 1, Simon Garfield got to know the enormously influential
DJ, who died last week. Here he offers some favourite tales - in Peel's own
words

Sunday October 31, 2004
The Observer

Six years ago, I conducted a series of interviews with John Peel at Radio 1
and in the wine bar nearby. It wasn't difficult work: I turned on the
tape-recorder and sat back, and after 10 minutes of mild suspicion and Rioja
he hit a groove of sad and funny stories that brought tears to his eyes and
mine, and all I could do was hope the batteries were fresh.

My memory of him is of a hugely sensitive man who cared very much about his
music and his family, but also about how he was regarded by others. A
magazine interview he had recently given had been very harsh on him,
questioning whether he genuinely liked most of the records he played, and
Peel had been terribly hurt by it. Looking back, it is significant how often
in our conversations he considered his standing among his peers, and how
much he relished his reputation as a pariah within the corporation. This was
a role he found useful to foster, but in truth he was a shy and quiet man,
prone to internalising his anger. And he was immensely loyal; he knew that
he could only function in public service broadcasting, and in time he became
its best advertisement.

I had first met him 18 years earlier, when he provided the narration for a
radio documentary I had written. I told him how thrilled I was to hear him
voice my script, and was astonished when he replied that he was genuinely
happy to have the extra work. The extent of his talents was not fully
exploited until Home Truths many years later. His impact on so many lives
has not been fully measured until the past week.

His producer and great friend John Walters, who Peel was convinced would
deliver the eulogy at his funeral but died three years before him, had
warned me that many of Peel's stories were embellished, and he could prove
that some of them couldn't possibly be true. Peel often told him that his
grandfather used to get champagne on the National Health. Walters questioned
him on this, and Peel always said, 'Yes, champagne.' Eventually, the story
changed. 'Oh, I asked my mum, and I muddled it up,' Peel conceded one day.
'It wasn't champagne. It was morphine.'

Peel told me that his domestic life had recently been 'complicated'. His
beloved wife Sheila had a made a good recovery from her brain haemorrhage,
an event he found 'unimaginably terrifying', but her eyesight had
deteriorated. In addition, her mother had recently died, and her father had
moved in, and their children were in various stages of leaving home.
Throughout these turmoils, there was one reliable comfort. He said that
everything 'seems to be all right again when I come in and start
mispronouncing the names of songs'.

Here are my own favourite Peel stories from those tapes.

On discovering Elvis:

'I'm a great believer in getting your priorities wrong, setting your sights
low, so that you don't go through your whole life frustrated that you never
became prime minister.

As a young lad, I used to listen to the American Forces Network in Europe,
coming out of Stuttgart, and to Radio Luxembourg, and the signals were
always satisfyingly feeble, so that you really felt you were participating
in something quite exceptional. The record that genuinely changed my life
was on Two-Way Family Favourites on the BBC. It may be hard now to
understand how frustrating it was to listen to the radio then, because you
could often sit and listen to a programme for several hours and not hear a
single record that you liked. You'd listen to things like Housewives' Choice
in the morning - based on the premise, shared by Radio 1 when it started,
that housewives were some sort of subnormal minority group, as if perfectly
sensible women would walk down the aisle but then return as gibbering
idiots.

Two-Way Family Favourites was a show that reunited our boys overseas with
their families back home on a Sunday lunchtime. One afternoon I heard them
say, 'Lance Bombardier Higgins has requested the first record by the new
American singing sensation Elvis Presley.' On came Elvis, and it sounds
idiotic to say it now, but at the time 'Heartbreak Hotel' was just a
revelation, like being transported immediately to another planet. The only
thing that came close was when I heard Little Richard a few weeks later. It
was genuinely frightening, as if something had been unleashed on the world
that would never go back in the bottle. It turned out to be the case,
wonderfully.

The quest for perfection:

'I lived in the States for seven years in the Sixties. In the days before we
knew about sexism, me and a couple of mates used to follow the fortunes of a
young woman who performed under the name of Chris Colt, the Girl with the
45s. We used to follow her from grisly strip joint to grisly strip joint. I
was driving back from a particularly exhilarating performance in New
Orleans, having left my friends down there, and I was crossing what they
call the Piney Woods of East Texas, which cover an area the size of Belgium,
as all big woods invariably do. I was driving along this long road in the
middle of the night, and the moon was at the far end, so it was like driving
along a silver ribbon, if you want to be poetic about it, and the hills were
rising and falling, and there was a small town before me, and on the radio
came a record by Elmore James called 'Stranger Blues'. The first two lines
were, 'I'm a stranger here/I just drove in your town.' I just thought it was
a perfect conjuncture of time, place and music. You always hope in the
course of doing a programme that somebody somewhere may experience a moment
like that.'

Heroin in his hair:

'I used to run a record label, catastrophically unsuccessful, called
Dandelion, named after a hamster - that's how things were in the late
Sixties. We put out about 30 LPs using other people's money. There were one
or two I quite like to listen to, and one or two atrocities. Stackwaddy were
fantastic. They had an album called Bugger Off , which Annie Nightingale
used to play a lot. They were punks before there were punks - these very
primitive lads from Manchester who played a rather violent and inaccurate
r'n'b. Once we got a person over from the States to see a whole load of
Dandelion bands at a college in London. We made the mistake of putting
Stackwaddy on first. The singer was a deserter from the army, and wore this
improbable wig all the time. They turned the treble up on all their
equipment, so it was like listening to a kind of buzzsaw. The singer was
very drunk, and the first thing he did at the start of the gig was just walk
to the edge of the stage and **** on the students.

When Radio 1 started, it was generally regarded as rather unhealthy for
presenters to show any interest in music, as it was believed this would lay
us open to unscrupulous promotions people offering fast cars and women. Of
course these things never happened, but you did have to keep your interest
in music very much to yourself. In earlier days there were times when senior
management at 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
a man to do this 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.'

The bloody awful rubbish:

'At Radio 1 I try to keep myself to myself. I've always thought that
avoiding office politics was a rather shrewd thing to do. I feel a bit like
a person who lives in a cottage while a new estate is being built around
him - so long as I can tend to my bees, I'm perfectly happy. I don't
socialise that much with people here. I occasionally go to the pub or the
wine bar with some of the women, because obviously they don't see me as a
threat. I'm not likely to try to get off with them.

I do still see the Radio 1 thing as being what I do. Radio 4 is still seen
as being the senior service, so when a couple of impeccably middle-class
women call up and ask me to do a programme I'm always hugely flattered. You
go off to very low-key places like Coventry to interview a family who have
19 children, and you think, 'Oh no', but then you meet them and you come
away quite heartened by it all. Sometimes, if you're a regular reader of the
newspapers and watch TV news programmes, you can whip yourself up into a
froth of despair. So going out and finding that not everybody wants to kill
you is kind of reassuring.

In 30 years there has genuinely never been an attempt by management to exert
any control over my programmes, not beyond the occasional comment like, 'Ah,
John, you still playing that bloody awful rubbish?' Someone from management
did come down when I was playing a lot of hip hop, and then later when I was
playing jungle, to inform me that I shouldn't be playing this music, because
it was the music of the black criminal classes.

I think I was a handy safety valve for some time. If someone called up to
complain about the safe and predictable nature of the station's playlist,
someone could always tell them, 'You can always listen to John Peel. He
plays strange discs.'

Tony Blackburn goes Barry Manilow:

'As a Radio 1 DJ, you were expected to do ludicrous things. We had these
Radio 1 Fun Weeks, 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. 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.

But these things did have compensations. Perhaps the best moment for me took
place in a multistorey 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.'

A particularly viscous tackle:

'Occasionally, I'd be invited to these rather serious BBC events at TV
Centre. I used to dread these things, but you had to go. Quite often I was
the only person from Radio 1 who was invited, probably because I had been to
public school. Once I found myself sitting across the table from the Two
Ronnies and thinking, 'What do I say to these *******s?'

On another occasion, I had just recorded Desert Island Discs , so I went
along with Sue Lawley. When we sat down I was at a table which included
Nicholas Witchell, PD James and Jonathan Powell. I turned to the bloke
sitting next to me and said, 'Hello, I'm John Peel.' And he said, 'I'm John
Birt, and actually we were introduced five minutes ago outside.' You don't
really recover from that. After about an hour of non-conversation, I said to
him something about football, and he said, 'Didn't you break your wrist
playing five-a-side in Holborn about 10 years ago?' I said, 'How did you
know that?' He said, 'I was the bloke that tackled you.'

People say I 'discovered' or 'made' certain bands, but I never really think
of it like that. I don't have a series of notches on my bedpost. They
discovered themselves really, or some record company or manager did, and
what I did was what I'm paid to do - play their records on the radio. I
didn't discover The Undertones or Joy Division - they made magnificent
records and I played them because I loved them. The fact that most other
people were not playing them is the thing, but you'd have to ask them why
that was. I think I helped listeners discover the bands, and if one more
person has the chance to see Misty In Roots because they heard them on one
of my shows, then I'm happy about that.

I don't tend to mix with bands. I'm too shy or respectful, and I don't think
I would know what to say. I don't know very much about their history. Also,
there's that thing about not wanting to lower my admiration of them, which I
might do if I met them, and I feel they'd certainly have a lower impression
of me.'

How to make the perfect radio show:

'A lot of people working [at Radio 1], young people, come up to me and make
rather un-British little speeches about how they grew up listening to my
programme, which is lovely to hear, and then you can think to yourself,
'Well, perhaps you wouldn't even be working here if it wasn't for me,' and I
quite like the thought of that. But even the younger ones stopped listening
to the programme at some stage. It seems that people listen to the programme
for a while and then stop, and often listen to the programme later on in
their lives. I get letters from people who say, 'I hadn't listened to your
programme for 12 years, and I was driving home the other night and heard
something I thought was fantastic. I've listened every night since, and it
was just how it used to be.'

Sometimes kids write in and say, 'I was listening to your programme in my
bedroom the other night when I was doing my homework, and my mum came in and
said, "What are you listening to?" I said, "John Peel," and she said, "Oh, I
used to listen to him when I was your age."' It's nice being woven into
people's lives in that way.

I always compare a good programme to surfing, not that I ever surf. When a
programme goes well, you do feel you're riding along on the crest of
something. You go out of the studio at the end and say, 'Wow, what a great
programme!' and they say, 'Oh, it sounded like all the others to me.' But
some nights you can come away feeling so desperate because you've made so
many mistakes, and you go out and say, 'That was just a disaster.' And
people say, 'Oh, it sounded just like all the others to me.'

I listen to bands' demo tapes almost exclusively in the car in the two-hour
drive home. The ones I don't like get thrown on the floor in the passenger's
area and by the end of the week they swill about. The ones I do like get
thrown over my shoulder into the back seat, and then harvested at the end of
the week. I know that I'm going to die trying to read the name of some band
in the headlights of a car behind me, and then drive into a truck in front.
People will say, 'Oh, this is the way he would have wanted to go.'

Will anyone assume Peel's mantle? Is there a good "alternative" music
show on the BBC, because I've had trouble finding it.