The Sigla Blog

Originally published on Sigla, November 2004

John Peel, veteran BBC dj, died last month. Sinéad Gleeson recalls what it was that made the man so special to so many.

Like most people who are borderline obsessive/compulsive about music, I owe a huge debt to the size and shape of my music collection to John Peel. NME, Melody Maker and Sounds probably deserve a nod, but there was always something of following, not setting, the music agenda about that trinity of music mags. Dave Fanning opened my ears to a lot of music, but most of it never deviated far from the parallel tracks of alternative or indie music. John Peel, however, championed both, as well as ska, punk, dub reggae, death metal and African rhythms, among other things. One minute he’d play a Djembe-pounding group from West Africa and follow it up with the staccato pneumatics of Extreme Noise Terror or Napalm Death. It was heartening but difficult to take in that someone at least a decade older than my dad (and my dad’s got really good taste in music) liked Fela Kuti and The Slits.

When you’ve got a tiny amount to spend (all on records) in any given week, John Peel’s show was a cornucopia of new music to my young ears. I spent many nights listening to his sometimes clear, sometimes crackly show, depending on the signal. On the clear nights, I’d sit there poised with my finger hovering over the pause button of the tape deck, which already had play and record pressed down, waiting to glean what I could to record for my own homemade compilation tapes.

My poor dad would go to great lenghths to hook up this ridiculously long cable and fiddle about with it until the hissing subsided. Night after night, Peel never ceased to pull something I wasn’t expecting out of the hat. Listening to his show, was the ultimate in serendipity and I was always struck by the laid-back, haphazard, ‘what does this button do’? attitude; his luddism belying his vast competence at picking out a great tune.

Back in 1989, when he turned 50, Peel had a birthday bash and invited his three favourite bands of the time to play. I was chuffed when I discovered that I had records by two of the three - The House of Love and The Fall. The third band was The Wedding Present and my brother, being a fan of all three, helped me make up the numbers. We loved bands that John loved. It was like imagining your dad. In the 80s. Saying he liked Mark E. Smith and not Mark Knopfler. It just blew my mind.

My failings on the music front are that I don’t actually play any instruments but I know a massive amount of people who do or did and I can safely say that all of them aspired to that Willy-Wonka esque prize of a Peel Session. Years ago, one friend who was in a band sent Peel a rough-round-the-edges demo knowing he got truck loads of music sent to him. I can’t remember if he got a session but he played the demo and chatted to him on the phone one day when he had the nerve to ring up the BBC and ask to speak to him.

Another friend had a similar story about the down-to-earthness of the man (and I’m going to track him down and get him to tell me the story in full but here’s the short version). Peel used to run competitions to offload - or share more like - boxes of records from his bloated record collection of vinyl. All you had to do was to answer a question and you could win a box of 250 records that were once owned by John Peel. My mate, a long-time listener to the show, was one of ten lucky winners but was confused when two and a half months had passed and there was still no sign of his vinyl bounty. He promptly wrote to JP, told him what a fan he was and asked if there was any sign of the vinyl. So on Christmas Eve, he gets a call out of the blue from the man himself, apologising for the delay and saying he’ll drop them down himself when he’s in Derry the next month. And he did…

With this average bloke, a bloke who’d drop a box of records over to you house in rural Ireland, it wasn’t just about hearing established bands you liked. It could be, depending on what mood he was in or mostly whether he liked them or not. For me, it was mostly about being exposed to music you just wouldn’t hear anywhere else back then. It was a chance to hear new bands whose youth and aspiration got a chance to spill over the airwaves thanks to Peelie.

His oeuvre may never be repeated or equalled but I’d like to thank John Peel for the cache of challenging music I would never have discovered without him. I only hope that wherever he is, he’s got a pile of crackly old vinyl and a decent needle on his turntable.

Sinéad Gleeson