(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.