[peel] I feel Voxish

[Leo/Bianca]

Tom from Atlanta,

Many thanks for your fascinating, and engagingly written, piece about John's
working life. 

The man really is a marvel. Long may he continue.

Leo Gilbert

> From: Tom Roche <troche@...>
> Reply-To: peel@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 19:18:56 -0400
> To: peel@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [peel] I feel Voxish
> 
> OK, some background.
> 
> I first wrote Peel nearly 20 years ago from Florida to say thanks for the
> BBCWS show, not expecting a response. But he wrote back promptly, as he didn't
> get much mail at all re: the WS show other than of the "play more U2" sort.
> Then, in Atlanta, I kept writing, often sending regional US rock stuff and odd
> music articles, as I do to this day, at some expense. But I do so happily as
> I'm glad to join in the public service ethic Peel still clings to.
> 
> I may be able to lay claim to being the show's first overseas internet
> listener, too.
> 
> The Benz is gone, he drives a big silver Audi I think with a elaborate CD
> changer and a high-falootin track/control display. Sheila has a new PT
> cruiser, a spacious fun ride. The day I got there was the day he came home
> from Barcelona. He arrived from his 3 days in London with three huge Royal
> Mail sacks full of parcels of CD's and vinyl -- from the mightiest of labels
> down to the starving garage kids begging for a break, and everything
> in-between, sent to his BBC address. This was about 14 days' accumulation.
> Still more stuff comes in daily to his Stowmarket address, mostly Euro-vinyl
> it seems, from interesting labels he's entrusted his home address to. A
> dangling participle there, the first of many.
> 
> So began the inside view of just what "the chaos of Peel acres" really means.
> 
> One night John and Sheila had a dinner party they had to attend, thrown by the
> Dr who'd saved Sheila's life. So I volunteered to open and organizes all three
> 4ft tall sacks while they were out. It took me, (well me and Paul the Cowcube
> guy who'd stopped by to hand deliver my CD purchase) 5 hours straight to open
> it all - basically from the time J&S left to when they came back at
> midnight... when I was still at it. He branded me absolutely mad for my
> perseverance. Well takes a madman to know a madman, right? Someone had to do
> it. This task, plus the pricey Lightnin Hopkins 78s I'd brought, would serve
> as rent.
> 
> There was new stuff from dozens of mystery bands, postmarked mostly from UK
> but also Spain, Germany, 10 different US states. Then historical stuff, old
> soul, jazz, Hawaiian, rockabilly, scads of reggae reissues. Then theres all
> these bands he played first and then moved on but they still send him product-
> stuff I saw as diverse as Ash, James, King Crimson reissues, Ramones & Smiths
> anthologies and on and on. Plus ragged non-label demo CD's... a few arrive
> each day, all year. Just processing all this input - irregardless of the
> audition process - how does he do it?
> 
> John says that the big irony in his professional life is that if he were to
> give each item the proper attention and evaluation for his radio shows he
> would have no time to do the radio shows in the first place.
> 
> So these incoming CD's, with press releases folded inside each, slowly make it
> from the kitchen table to his work area just off the kitchen. One turntable,
> one CD player, one TV usually on a sports event with the sound down, a nice
> view out to the garden, and CD's piled into dozens of 1,2 ,3, and 4 ft stacks.
> The room, maybe 8ft x 16ft, is lined with shelves packed with vinyl and books.
> (A stack of 8x10" sheets neatly piled over 20 inches tall sits on a lower
> shelf - the manually-typewritten single spaced run sheets of every show he's
> done in the past 10+ years or so. )
> 
> A center shelving unit full of more paperwork and albums serves as his desk,
> he works standing upŠ he lifts another single out of the sleeve, looks at each
> side, places it on the turntable, starts his wristwatch clock and stands there
> examining the sleeve as the record blares....  as he has methodically done ten
> thousand times. His audition process is surprisingly slow, as he doesn't hop
> around CD's and tracks; he listens most items all the way thru so as to log an
> accurate duration - the running times on the labels cant be trusted.
> 
> Yet he has such a good knowledge of what the current most innovative labels
> are, and of course a keen instinct of an item's potential based on the cover
> art or song titles, that it seemed to me that more than 70% of what he elects
> to audition is worthy of airplay.
> 
> So when he arrived Thursday evening (after two Radio 1 shows, and a day and a
> half in-studio working on interviews and voice overs for Home Truths) to begin
> what to you and me might be a restful weekend, all he saw was six hours of
> blank run sheets for the shows to air the following Tues-Wed-Thursday. Plus
> the German show. Plus the Radio Mafia show. Plus the BBCWS half hour, due at
> some undefined point. Plus another Radio Times column needed right away, said
> a message from the editor.
> 
> He takes a blank sheet of lined paper and divides it into fourths. Each block
> will be a 30 minute segment. He starts wading through the piles of product. If
> the track is strong it makes the list. If it is, say, a techno thing he might
> put it in the 2nd or 3rd block depending on how much techno, or reggae, or
> white guitar stuff or whatever is already in that blockŠ so there is actually
> a structure to the randomness. If a CD happens to have one strong cut after
> another, he can block out new blank sheets for future shows and slug that
> stuff there, allowing him to make good on the occasional promise of "we'll
> hear more tomorrow" or whatever. He places a rectangular sticker on each
> auditioned CD or LP and rates each cut with one to 3 stars. Few items it
> seemed make it past one or two 3-star cuts, but the Half Man Half Biscuit EP
> arrived that day, all cuts got 3 stars and all cuts immediately were entered
> across the week's shows.
> 
> One single from Germany he auditioned had this odd semi-ambient tape loop
> sound - you know, this current mini-trend where we have moved from
> intentionally muddying samples to looping samples intentionally off beat with
> pops and clicks added (I'm sure there is a NME-esque name for this genre by
> nowŠ one of the "problems" with Peel's shows is so much is so new the name for
> the trend hasn't been coined yet.) The single had birds chirping too, and it
> sounded just thoroughly great and one-of-a-kind to my Americanized ears. "I
> really like that, that's really unique" I said and he said yes, its good
> allright, but there is so so much of this sort of sound coming out right now.
> 
> To me this was a good example of how just as we are all catching on to some
> new thing he is already nearly over it and itching for something else.
> 
> So the auditions went onward, for practically every waking hour of the whole
> weekendŠ before breakfast at sunrise, late into the night, constant music
> coming from the room off the kitchen. Sometimes the midday nap happens on a
> chair in that room, 12-inchers piled on his sleeping lap.
> 
> Its easy for some hotshot Americanski like me to observe all this and start to
> offer some dumb suggestions on how this might all be streamlinedŠ why not give
> up the manual typewriter and get a computer here and a keyboard there and
> move songs to harddrives bla blaŠ maybe sort your stuff this/that way,
> etc...but, no, his system works just fine...  there's really a tortoise vs.
> the hare aspect to all thisŠ he does it all alone, his wayŠ and eventually,
> finally, in the end he has 6 hours of programming ready... All excellent stuff
> that's fresh yet timeless, all sequenced wisely and properly timed. (His show
> always ends only a few seconds either side of midnight and no more, had you
> noticed?)
> 
> I'd always assumed these shows just rolled out before me for my enjoyment as
> if by effortless magic. Now I know better.
> 
> By next Friday morning, 6 more hours of blank run sheets stare back at him....
> 
> Hope this was helpful. Sorry about any stream-of-consciousness typos....
> 
> 
> tom r
> 
> 
> 
> 
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