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.'