My Mess O Peel Shows, wot to do?

[Tom Roche]

Someday I will sort out my own Peel show collection... for a Yank I 
have quite a few, and there's an interesting story behind it.

Years ago MartinW would tape some for me, at some expense to me 
because of Air Mail. All those have been saved.

Then a very good friend at CNN Atlanta got transferred to the CNN 
London bureau about 1990 or so. As we both had other mutual friends 
at CNN here, she would send to me (by way of the CNN friends) the odd 
NME or MM via CNN's huge daily inter-office courier sack -- freeing 
both of us from overseas postage.

I got an idea. I would go to the discount warehouse and buy 30-50 
blank 90min cassettes at a time, give them to pals to put in the bag 
to London, she would then record Peel show after Peel show, and 
courier them back. This went on, semi-monthly, for 10+ years. So I 
have hundreds and hundreds of shows.

Additionally, a friend here had a backyard dish in the 80's which 
could get BBCWS in clean, mono AM, without the SW static. As he is a 
Peel fan too, he recorded each and every BBCWS show John did across 
perhaps 2 decades... and he'd pass them on to me. (You know for the 
first decade or so of the SW show Peel would [or was directed to] 
only play UK tracks. It was a huge deal for us when he started 
playing US/African/etc stuff.)

Of course over time we were just swimming in all these cassettes, and 
even though this was pre-internet and this was the only John Peel 
access we yanks had, we would recycle them for new shows. And of 
course Peel was going to be around forever, right? So only a fraction 
of those WS shows survive in my files, but quite a few nonetheless - 
the really good ones.

And I recorded a few dozen myself right of SW on nights when things 
were clear. Ain't nothing like Dub Syndicate on top of SW 
fading/flanging.

Ironically/paradoxically with the rise of the internet I could listen 
live and the taping stopped and from 2000 on I have very very little.

Unfortunately my life is hopelessly busy w/raising 2 kids etc and 
it'll be years and years before any of this gets sorted out, ha. 
Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up!


tom