Article About Peel's Life and Death That Tom Wrote

[Tom Roche]

There is A Light That Never Goes Out

By Tom Roche


And so we begin at the end. John Peel, the legendary broadcaster, 
master communicator, perpetual adolescent, and champion of three 
generations of unsigned bands, died at 65 on October 25, 2004.

He did what would turn out to be his last Radio 1 show on October 14, 
featuring the usual fascinating genre collision of the up-to-date and 
vintage, the obscure and the memorable, all in the same way he had 
presented this unique parade continually since 1967.

Peel's playlist that Thursday would, as usual, send a Clear Channel 
programmer into an apoplectic fit: Techno-chill from DJ Preach, 
full-throttle rock from the Detroit Cobras, and yet another fresh new 
Peel Session. The exclusive session guests this time, joining 
hundreds of others over the decades, was the unsigned grindcore band 
Trencher (with their jolting new songs "I Lost All My Hair in a 
Skiing Accident" and "Trapped Under a Train Alive.") Trencher, a band 
so new and obscure that a websearch returns nothing, was soon 
followed by an actual Conway Twitty 78. John also dug out regular 
favorite Jimmy Reed, and the Fall's "Powder Keg."

His last track was by the amazing electro-innovators Klute, called 
"Time 4 Change" from their new LP No One's Listening Anymore on, 
tellingly, the Commercial Suicide label.

Although he sounded as lively and as happy as ever on air, by some 
accounts he was overworked and made weary by a schedule that would 
burden a person half his age. While programming and presenting three 
two-hour BBC Radio 1 shows weekly, plus a weekly spoken-word hour on 
Radio 4, a weekly music show on World Service, and shows for small 
European networks, he somehow kept track of the hundreds of new demos 
arriving every month from unsigned bands. Not to mention his role as 
a busy and devoted father of four. And, lastly, he was in receipt of 
a £1.5 million advance to write his definitive autobiography, a task 
he could barely find time to begin.

So John, along with Sheila, his wife of 30 years, set out on a 
three-week vacation to Peru as a much-needed break.

A few days later, John phoned the BBC from Peru to tell his young 
producers all was fine, and could someone go on the internet and look 
up where the best record stores are in Lima? Later that week he 
journeyed to the town of Cuzco, Peru, high in the Andean Mountains. 
After an uneventful day, John was preparing for dinner when he 
suffered a massive heart attack.

The attending physician, Dr.Alcides Vargas, told Peruvian Radio, "Mr. 
Peel was lying on the floor in the (hotel) lobby, and his wife Sheila 
was crying uncontrollably. There was complete hysteria. We had 
medical equipment like defibrillators and a ventilator. But there 
were no vital signs."

Dr. Vargas said the thin air of Cuzco, some 11,000 feet above sea 
level, almost certainly triggered John's fatal attack. (Peel had been 
diagnosed as diabetic in 2001, a condition that can quietly elevate 
heart risks.)

Back in Britain, the outpouring was immediate and overwhelming: Over 
5,000 messages of condolences to the BBC web site within three hours, 
and 30,000 tributes from all over the world were sent by the end of 
the week. Radio 1 scrapped all regular programming for the day. 
Reggae and techno-dance websites paid tribute. Alt-country and 
doom-metal websites paid tribute. And the next issue of NME featured 
a simple black and white close-up, over the text: "John Peel 
1939-2004. HERO. LEGEND. GOOD BLOKE."

It was a sudden, tragic end to a fascinating life story, full of both 
ambition and the lack of it, strange detours, and simple twists of 
fate.


LIVERPOOL ROOTS

John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, (his real name) was born near 
Liverpool England Aug 30, 1939, the son of a well-off textile broker. 
In his early school years, Peel was, admittedly, quite unmotivated, 
as evidenced by a note attached to his report card one day. He once 
recalled, "At my primary school (and bear in mind that my name is 
John) the headmistress wrote, 'Robin has failed to make much 
impression this term.'"

Later, "People said to me (at high school), 'If you don't work hard 
you won't go to university.' I assumed university would just be an 
extension of public school, and, at the time, it would have been. So 
I thought: thank you for telling me that. So I didn't work and didn't 
go."

"You had so little control over your life" in that regimented British 
upbringing he said. "Maybe failure was the only instrument of control 
you had."

It wasn't even the 1960s yet and Peel was already dropping out. He 
sought out non-BBC radio fare such as American Forces Radio from 
Europe. "The first time I heard Little Richard on AFR, I was actually 
frightened by it -- you could not believe such an intense and simple 
noise could be coming out of your radio. It was like Saul on the road 
to Damascus, a life-changing experience." One schoolmate at the time 
was Michael Palin, who would eventually be a co-founder of Monty 
Python's Flying Circus. Says Palin, "I remember him lying on his back 
in his study, listening to, I guess it was, skiffle. Even then he 
introduced us to music he'd never heard. Even then he was a rebel, an 
independent voice."

>From 1957 to 1959 he was drafted into the Army as a radar operator in 
the Royal Artillery.  He noted later, "The Army said afterwards, 'At 
no time has he shown any sign of adapting to the military way of 
life.' I took it as a compliment."


DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS

Peel's father had business contacts in Texas, and offered to send 
Peel there in 1960, where the contacts treated him as cheap labor. He 
then took a brief stint selling door-to-door insurance, and around 
this time, incredibly, he was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the day 
John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Out of curiosity, he went to the 
Dallas police station and bluffed his way into Lee Harvey Oswald's 
arraignment hearing, claiming in a heavy accent that he was a 
reporter for The Liverpool Echo. "I then went and made what I'd said 
retrospectively true and phoned The Liverpool Echo to give them the 
story. But they didn't care. I was a bit wounded by that."

Old newsreel film of the event shows Jack Ruby to have been in the 
room also, and Peel standing off in a corner. Peel remembers, "In a 
documentary they showed on British television, the camera pans across 
the room to show Ruby, and, in the last few frames, me and my friend 
Bob are standing there looking like tourists."

Peel's only respite from the insurance racket was the Dallas Top 40 
AM stations. When the Beatles invasion hit, one DJ - WRR's Russ 
"Weird Beard" Knight -- began cluelessly talking up England and 
Liverpool, Peel found it to be "complete nonsense. I phoned him up, 
and he put me on the air as 'Our Man From Liverpool.'" After few 
weeks of on-air call-ins Peel was offered a weekend job.

His first full-time radio gig was at KOMA in Oklahoma City in 1965. 
"Americans thought Europe was the size of a village, so they assumed 
anyone from Liverpool was a close personal friend of Ringo."


THE WARM CALIFORNIA SUN

Peel moved to San Bernadino, an hour outside of L.A. in 1966, landing 
a gig at tiny KMEN-AM. The winds of change sweeping the Southern 
California music scene were having an effect on regimented Top 40 
radio formats. The Doors, Frank Zappa, Love, and Quicksilver were 
abandoning the three-minute hit single format for extended 
innovations, but would radio "play" along?

Around this time, a younger-than-she-looked music fan became a 
groupie of some of KMEN's eclectic DJs, offering various services... 
services Peel has declined to name. Unbeknownst to all, in a plot 
twist straight out of Riot On Sunset Strip, she was also the daughter 
of the San Bernadino sheriff. Said sheriff, like practically all 
holding that office in 1966, policed on an anti-hippie, 
clean-up-the-town platform. In short order, he swore out arrest 
warrants for all the stations DJs. Peel felt he could have exonerated 
himself, but with a furious sheriff on his back, and with his travel 
visa long overstayed, he elected not to fight city hall. He left town 
within hours, eventually crossed into Canada as John Robert Parker, 
and returned to England.


PIRATE AT SEA

Back in his homeland, Peel longed for the free sounds he'd heard in 
California, but he found BBC radio to be totally, banally, out of 
touch. In another odd twist of fate, a neighbor in London knew 
someone who worked on the pirate radio ship Radio London. Along with 
pirate Radio Caroline and others, RL was illegally broadcasting a 
steady stream of pop and psychedelic music from a ship anchored five 
miles off the UK coast. He was hired to do Top 40 during the day, but 
also volunteered to pull the midnight-to-three shift, developing the 
unique programming style that would last nearly four decades. "When I 
realized none of the management was listening at night, I did away 
with the format and played what I wanted, even read listeners' poetry 
-- hippie stuff I would find amazingly embarrassing if I heard it 
now."


But the pirate era was ending. The British government whipped up 
draconian new laws granting them the power to board ships in 
international waters and confiscate gear and record collections in 
the name of national security. Peel's pirate stint lasted only five 
months. The BBC had seen their youth audience near-totally absorbed 
by the pirates and the Euro mega-power Radio Luxembourg, so 
reluctantly, the BBC created all-pop Radio 1 in 1967 (signing-on with 
The Move's "Flowers In The Rain.") Even more reluctantly, the BBC was 
forced to turn to former pirate DJs to try to shore up some semblance 
of credibility. Among the first group of DJs hired, Peel would 
outlast them all, playing music on BBC Radio 1 from 1967 to October 
2004.


THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

When punk arrived, Peel carried the torch for this amazing new wave 
of audacity and amateurism, finding it to be "a welcome breath of 
foul air. When I first played the Ramones, I got nasty letters from 
people wanting me to play the Grateful Dead for the rest of their 
lives. The average age of the audience in those four months dropped 
from 25 to 15." Peel's longtime producer John Waters once said, "When 
we were listening to new bands, it was like John had a divining 
rod... as if he'd walk out into the middle of a huge field and say, 
'It's here.'"

In 1977, Peel was almost fired for playing the Sex Pistols on the 
BBC; yet in 1997, Peel's BBC show was pre-empted for a long-form Sex 
Pistols radio tribute special.

He was first to play a number of historic albums in their entirety, 
from Sgt. Pepper's  to Trout Mask Replica  to Tubular Bells  to Meat 
Is Murder. Genres we are now all familiar with, from punk to gangsta, 
from grunge to jungle, from glitch to grime, he played first before 
these genres even had a name.


LOOKING BACK, AND FORWARD

I first wrote Peel nearly 20 years ago to just say thanks for the 
weekly BBC show he did on shortwave (received with barely passable 
reception in Atlanta.) I mentioned that some band he'd played doing a 
noisy Paul Simon cover was nothing new to Atlantans, home of the 
memorable all-Paul-Simon-punk-cover-band The Coolies. I didn't expect 
a response, but he wrote back promptly. Apparently he didn't get much 
international mail at all for his World Service shows other than 
"play-more-Hall-and-Oates" requests. So in the rare instance someone 
wrote to say they "got it," he took note.

In his reply he said I should "tell (Atlanta record label 
entrepreneur) Danny Beard I played that Coolies record a lot." He 
also asked to ship him any Atlanta and regional records he might 
enjoy. I sent off the 688 Records compilation, (and he latched on to 
Dash Rip Rock briefly) and many other records over time. Once, he 
replied to a comment I'd made about a great weird reggae record he'd 
played ("Border Clash" by Ninjaman) by surprisingly sending me a copy 
of the record he bought himself. This correspondence went on for 
years, and we'd meet for a pint whenever I'd visit London. (His 
current BBC producer said recently that John still spent upwards of 
£200 a month of his own money in London record shops purchasing 
records for his shows.)

I was invited to his house in the English countryside, where I last 
saw him in 2001. It was a normal Saturday at "Peel Acres," and he was 
preparing for yet another week of shows. Sacks and stacks of incoming 
CD's and LPs were sorted, and, stopwatch in hand, auditioned. (He 
never trusted the song durations printed on the disc.) He seemed to 
spend every waking hour auditioning records, finding favor with 
perhaps 30% and discarding the rest. Slowly, a 2-hour playlist took 
shape.

I had always assumed these shows just rolled out before me for 
everyone's enjoyment as if by effortless magic. Now I knew better. By 
the end of that week, six more hours of blank run sheets stared back 
at him and it was time to start the process again.


CONFIDENCE

BBC Radio's daytime programs in the '80s, though pop-laden, were 
still filled with incredibly cheesy presentation and inane patter. 
Undaunted, Peel trudged on. In late 2004, as the tributes poured in, 
it was worth remembering this quote from 1987: "BBC Radio 1 is not 
sympathetic to my program and music. In 20 years, no one in the 
building has ever come in with an encouraging or complimentary word. 
In a way, it keeps you going; you say 'I'll show the bastards!'"

Peel told Pulse Magazine in 1990, "I can't understand why people want 
to hear stuff coming out of the radio that they've got on record at 
home and have heard a hundred times before!" There you have it: one 
voice, in one sentence, totally trashing the business model of 
corporate FM radio today.


John Peel had the fearless confidence that within one program it was 
it was totally logical to mix alt-country, cutting-edge dance, dub 
reggae, death metal, and African pop, alongside the most ragged yet 
earnest young bands. As Peel told Stomp and Stammer magazine in 2000, 
"There's good stuff going on all the time." His program format was 
radically simple: say what you are about to play, play it, then say 
what it was. The end. Even if it was 15 seconds of speedpunk. 
"Sometimes the music was just awful," said fellow BBC DJ Andy 
Kershaw. "But you mainly listened to Peel for Peel."

Above all, Peel had confidence in the intelligence of his audience.

It has been estimated that 80% of the music he played in his 37-year 
run on the BBC had never been played on the radio before. And 98% of 
what he played, he played once and never again. Although an expert 
radio technician, he'd regularly play records at the wrong speeds, 
leaving him embarrassed but defensive. Look, he'd say, these are 
white label 12-inchers with no artist, titles, or RPM info at all -- 
but killer tracks nonetheless. It would be so much easier not to play 
them at all, and most DJs would do just that.

BBC Radio began webcasting in 1997, extending his domestic program to 
an international reach. And soon ISDN technology enabled him to do 
his late-night programs from a small studio at his home in the 
country, a few steps from his astounding personal record library. 
Freed from the bureaucratic hassles of transmitting from BBC HQ, and 
elated at the instant feedback from both positive and negative 
e-mails, he had recently said he had never enjoyed presenting radio 
shows so much.

His impact on so many lives is immeasurable. Nearly every listener 
considered him a personal friend to some degree. And the few 
listeners that would contact him directly, such as this writer, found 
a lasting and real friendship. That friendship, like the man himself, 
will be irreplaceable.


THE FINAL FAREWELL

The massive 400-year-old St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, near John's rural 
home of Stowmarket, was the setting for John's funeral on Nov 12. 
Some 900 mourners had filled the church more than an hour before the 
service's start, while an overflow throng amassed before loudspeakers 
on the abbey lawn. There were hundreds of friends from the nearby 
villages and hundreds of BBC staffers, both young hip DJs and retired 
legendary voices going back to the birth of Radio 1.

A swarm of British paparazzi camped outside the church and zeroed in 
on the arrivals of Robert Plant, the White Stripes, Billy Bragg, 
Jarvis Cocker, Michael McCartney, and on and on.

Soon a solitary church bell began tolling, and all fell silent.

John's casket, borne on the shoulders of six bleary-eyed pallbearers 
and piled high with Liverpool-red flowers, was carried from the 
hearse to the cathedral's center aisle. As the Stowmarket Choral 
Society gently sang, there came the heartbreaking sight of John's 
widow Sheila and his four grieving children, slowly following the 
casket to the altar.

Amidst the somber mood, some of the eulogies were as funny as they 
were touching, but mostly the service was as sad as sad gets. Yes 
there were Bible readings and hymns, but John's eclectic stamp was 
evident throughout. At one point the hymns stopped, and across the 
vast cathedral space began the opening notes of the 1950s Howlin' 
Wolf classic "Goin' Down Slow," the rough-hewn Chicago blues 
masterpiece about one man's reflection on a life well-lived.

As Wolf's maniacal vocals bounced over the pews to the five stories 
of stained glass that surrounded us, I was filled with radically 
mixed emotions, unsure whether to laugh or cry. As the song echoed 
away, fading into a blurry ambient gauze, the more musically 
knowledgeable looked at each other and smiled broadly... while the 
villagers and the cheese-era BBC staffers seemed to be asking John 
yet again, "Just what was that awful racket??"

There was other music that day, from Mozart to Roy Orbison, and after 
these and after every eulogy, the church remained silent, while in 
the distance could be heard the roaring applause of the thousand-plus 
listening outside in the cold drizzle.

The concluding eulogy was co-written by John's four children, now in 
their teens and twenties, and read by a family friend. As they had 
entered that day it was clear they were emotionally wiped out, yet 
the tribute they had written was fresh, clever brash, bratty, 
insulting, and fun, just like pops.


Although John Peel had always admitted he was on an endless quest to 
find the perfect record, he had long ago decided that "Teenage Kicks" 
by Ireland's The Undertones was his favorite record of all time. 
"Sheila, my wife, knows that when I die, the only words I want on my 
tombstone, apart from my name, are: 'Teenage Dreams, So Hard To 
Beat.'"

As the cathedral doors were swung open, the pallbearers raised the 
casket and started back up the center aisle. The grief-weary 
congregation rose, and, not unexpectedly, the church was filled with 
the sound of "Teenage Kicks." Played really, really loud. "I wanna 
hold you wanna hold you tight, Get teenage kicks right through the 
night, Oh yeah."






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This article originally appeared in Stomp And Stammer magazine, December 2004


Material from The Guardian, The NME, The Times, The Daily Mail, and 
Pulse!, Filler, and Q magazines, and BBC World Service, contributed 
to this report.