When Radio London closed down on
August 14, 1967, John Peel joined the
BBC's new pop music station,
BBC 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 Two. The pirate stations had been successful partly because they played records continuously, but the BBC was gagged by the
Musicians' 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 introduce a show produced by Bernie Andrews 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.
At first he was obliged to share presentation duties with other
DJs (Pete Drummond and
Tommy Vance were among his co-hosts) but in February 1968 was given sole charge of "
Top Gear" - a role which he held until the show ended in 1975. His subsequent programmes, known simply as John Peel shows, continued in the same vein, playing an eclectic mix of music that simply caught Peel's attention. According to his autobiography, both the authorities at Radio 1 and his audience did not always appreciate the music he played, and at various stages of his career he received complaints for playing music, such as
reggae, hip-hop, punk and
industrial music, which challenged the preconceptions of his listeners.
From the start Peel had displayed a quirky, eclectic and avant-garde taste in music. He was largely responsible for introducing BBC listeners to
punk rock, reggae and
hip-hop and
electronic dance music. In 1973 he played both sides of
Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in full, the subsequent success of which helped establish
Richard Branson's Virgin music label. His favourite song was "
Teenage Kicks" by
The Undertones. Peel championed the long-running
Manchester band
The Fall, who played 24 sessions for the show, including one on Peel's 60th birthday. Once he 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. He remained a dominant force in independent music, both in the UK and across
Europe, until his death.
During 1969, after hosting a trailer for a BBC programme on
VD on his Night Ride programme, Peel received significant media attention because of admitting on air to having suffered from a
sexually transmitted disease earlier that year. This admission was later used in an attempt to discredit him when he appeared as a defence witness in the 1971
OZ obscenity trial. The judge in that case even instructed that a glass of water he had drunk from be thrown out.
The Night Ride programme (on Wednesdays, between 12 midnight and 1 a.m.), advertised by the
BBC as an exploration of words and music, seemed to take up from where the Perfumed Garden had left off. It featured a highly eclectic choice of music, from rock, folk (e.g., the
Incredible String Band, the
Young Tradition, John Renbourn, Davey Graham, Tangerine Dream) and blues (
Fred McDowell, Jo Ann Kelly) to classical (
Albéniz, Dvořák, Penderecki, Messiaen, Pachelbel's "Canon"). A unique feature of the programme was the inclusion of tracks, mostly of exotic non-Western music, drawn from the BBC Sound Archives; the most popular of these were gathered on a BBC Records LP, "John Peel's Archive Things" (1970). Night Ride also featured poetry readings from
Brian Patten, Carlyle Reedy,
Adrian Henri (and his band The Liverpool Scene),
Adrian Mitchell, Christopher Logue and many other "beat" or "pop" poets. There were also numerous interviews with a wide range of guests, from his personal friends - Marc Bolan, journalist and musician
Mick Farren, poet Pete Roche, singer-songwriter
Bridget St. John - to stars such as
the Byrds, the Rolling Stones and
John Lennon and
Yoko Ono - and even
Hans Keller, head of
BBC Radio 3. A youthful
Richard Branson promoted his magazine "Student";
Tony Elliott publicised the new London listings magazine "
Time Out". Peel interviewed a monk, Dom Robert Petit Pierre, and eulogised the night
Robert Kennedy was killed.
The programme captured much of the creative activity of the underground scene. Its anti-establishment stance and unpredictability did not find approval with the BBC hierarchy, though, and after 18 months it ended in September 1969. In his sleevenotes to the "Archive Things"
LP Peel calls the free-form nature of
Night Ride his preferred radio format, but he was never again to present such an adventurous programme (although others, notably Radio Geronimo, attempted US-style
hippy radio). The BBC's restrictive scheduling compelled him to return to the mixture of records and live sessions which was to characterise his Radio 1 programmes for the rest of his career.
Peel made his reputation in the late
1960s, but did not share the nostalgia of those who look back on it as a "golden era". Later, he would speak of being uncomfortable as a "minor princeling among the hippies" and uneasy with the
guru-like status he was afforded at the height of his fashionability. It was easy to forget that he was ten years older than most of his listeners; also, despite his tendency to talk about his life experiences between the records he played, his listeners knew little of the difficulties of his first marriage. He did, however, believe very strongly in the hippy ideals, and was deeply disappointed when some of the leading lights of the underground scene proved to be careerists, opportunists or charlatans.
After separation from his first wife, Peel's personal life began to stabilise, as he found friendship and support from new "Top Gear" producer
John Walters - and from a girlfriend whom he identified on-air as "the Pig". Eventually, on
31 August 1974, Peel married Sheila Gilhooly. The reception was in London's
Regent's Park, with Walters as best man. Peel wore Liverpool football colours (red) and walked down the aisle to the song "
You'll Never Walk Alone". Their
sheepdog, Woggle, served as a
bridesmaid. His relationship with Sheila was one of the most important things in his life.
Peel was the first to play the
Sex Pistols' "
God Save the Queen", in December 1976, having played "
Anarchy in the UK", which was banned from the BBC's daytime playlist, a month earlier. In 1976 he was also the first to play
Bob Dylan's Desire in the UK, despite
Capital Radio having exclusive permission from
CBS to be the first to do so. Peel got hold of a copy of the record and, to beat Capital, played it in full, separated by a reggae track while he changed the record over. Peel was to show this disregard for record company rules again when in 2003 he played three tracks from
The White Stripes album
Elephant before its official release date, resulting in him being threatened by lawyers for the record company
V2.
The fact that Peel played a large selection of music from outside the mainstream occasionally brought him into conflict with Radio 1 bosses. In early 1977 station controller
Derek Chinnery contacted
John Walters and asked him to confirm that the show was not playing any punk, which he (Chinnery) had read about in the press and disapproved of. Chinnery was evidently somewhat surprised by Walters' reply that in recent weeks they had been playing little else.
Relations between Peel and the station deteriorated further still when it was announced in 1984 that his broadcasts would be reduced from four to three a week, with
Tommy Vance's Into the Music show (playing mostly
progressive rock from the
1970s) filling the vacant slot. Peel was unhappy with the move and said so publicly on a number of occasions, although his displeasure was mitigated slightly when
Into the Music was axed after only a year.
His radio show was latterly sometimes broadcast from his home in
Suffolk, England, nicknamed "Peel Acres", and had a homely air, with his wife, Sheila, whom he affectionately referred to as "The Pig" (because of her laugh), and his children, William, Tom, Alexandra (Danda) and Florence (Flossie) often being involved or at least mentioned.
Latterly the show also regularly featured live performances, mostly from BBC
Maida Vale studios in
West London, but occasionally in the Peel Acres living room.
In addition to his championing of new music, Peel also played many older, often obscure records on his show, specifically in two sections he introduced:
* "The Pig's Big 78": Sheila, John Peel's wife, chose a
78 rpm record, which he played.
* "The Peelennium": broadcast over his last 100 shows of 1999, this covered the music of the 20th century. Each show covered a different year in turn—four records from the year would be played and main news stories covered.
Besides the countless bands he championed, Peel also supported the rare and the unusual, often in the form of the spoken word. If not for John Walters and John Peel, it's possible that
Vivian Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson End might never have been heard.
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. Peel wrote that
Peel's show was the only place on Radio 1 where listeners could hear the latest
electronic dance music before they became popular, such as the various styles of
house, techno and
hardcore music - indeed, there is a UK hardcore track entitled "John Peel is Not Enough" by the artist
CLSM, reflecting hardcore's hopes for wider broadcast exposure. Peel was so impressed by this that not only did he play it on his show several times, but dedicated an entire show to the genre, in hopes that it could spawn its own show. Peel also championed a wealth of other musical genres from
reggae to
death metal. However, his much vaunted eclecticism had its limits; he rarely if ever gave airtime to
industrial music, nor did he show any interest in or sympathy for
free jazz and
improvisation.
Many bands and artists of a wide range of different musical styles from different decades credit Peel as a major boost to their careers. The list includes
T-Rex, David Bowie, The Faces, Bolt Thrower, The Sex Pistols, The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, The Clash, Napalm Death, Carcass, Extreme Noise Terror, The Undertones, Buzzcocks, Gary Numan, The Cure, Joy Division, The Wedding Present, Six By Seven, Def Leppard, The Orb, Pulp, Ash, Orbital, The Smiths, FSK, Trumans Water, The Black Keys, The White Stripes and
PJ Harvey. Peel's reputation as the most important DJ breaking unsigned acts into the mainstream was such that young hopefuls sent him an enormous amount of records, CDs, and tapes. When he returned home from a three week holiday at the end of 1986 there were 173 LPs, 91 12"s and 179 7"s waiting for him.
Another example in point is 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.
He fronted and provided voiceovers for a large number of other programmes in his long career. Never someone to shy away from controversial topics, Peel agreed to front a 1994 one-off documentary for Radio 1 about the use of
recreational drugs by popular musicians. The programme, "Lost In Music", made by an independent production company, was heavily slated by a dry BBC Review board and
Liz Forgan in particular, who declared that she hoped "my children never hear this" . However it received critical acclaim for its honest approach to a delicate subject.
Peel remained on
BBC Radio 1 for 37 years, until his death in
2004. During that time over 4000 sessions were recorded for him by over 2000 artists. The last track he played on his final show was "Time 4 Change" by
Klute) from the album
No One's Listening Anymore.
