John Peel Day - Stanley Winston track (and anecdote)

[John Bravin]

Heard the Stanley Winston track No More Ghettos in America on the BBC 
Radio 1 John Peel Day show tonight and was reminded of the Peel quote 
about Stanley Winston/Mick Hucknall.  For those who missed the article 
in The Grauniad in September 2000 see below.

 >>>
**With more than 25,000 LPs straining the floorboards of his home, *John 
Peel* is more curator than collector, tending to a precious archive of 
leftfield music

*Will Hodgkinson
Friday September 1, 2000
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*

When a man's house has to be fitted with reinforcements in order to take 
the weight of his records, you know that his vinyl addiction has reached 
rarely seen heights of severity. John Peel's record collection is beyond 
a joke. There's a large wooden shed used only to accommodate his 12-inch 
singles, and another one, just past the chicken coop, which houses the 
45s. Being Britain's leading vanguard of any kind of music that falls 
out of the mainstream justifies the addiction somewhat, but these 
records aren't just the tools of his trade - they're too cherished for 
that.

Article continues 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/homeentertainment/story/0,12830,1336434,00.html#article_continue>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As my wife would confirm if she wasn't out shopping, I still spend an 
insane amount of time - six to eight hours a day - listening to records 
and putting together lists for the show," says Peel from the hub of his 
record world, which is his East Anglian farmhouse's old garage. All the 
new releases come here, a large cardboard box making up a week's worth 
of the records sent. The room has a boyish, den-like feel; between the 
racks of records and CDs are football memorabilia, photographs of his 
wife, Sheila, and hot rod magazines from the 50s and 60s.

Although the room feels chaotic and cramped, the records are very well 
ordered. The ones chosen to be played on future shows are recorded on a 
list, before being elevated from the boxes on the floor to the heights 
of the collection itself. Each is recorded on a card index. "People say, 
'Why don't you put the collection on computer?' But to put 25,776 LPs on 
to a computer would almost certainly take the rest of my life."

Passing into another room that houses Peel's first 1,500 records, it 
dawns on me that a curator's mindset must be essential just to keep the 
collection at least reasonably accessible. This is where his four 
children, and their boyfriends and girlfriends, come in handy. "Last 
summer I paid my daughter Flossie's then boyfriend to file my seven-inch 
singles, and he turned out to be the best filer I ever had. 
Unfortunately he and Flossie broke up shortly afterwards. Young people 
have so little consideration. My son William did that lot of CDs," says 
Peel, pointing to a rack, "and got paid prodigious sums of money to do 
so, but he took all summer - he's naturally an extremely indolent boy. 
He seems to have no grasp of the alphabet, either."

Some men have garden sheds to potter about in and get away from the 
wife; Peel has his two outhouses of records. "I'll come in here to find 
something, and almost always find something else that I've completely 
forgotten about. It's a great stress-reliever." Peel mulls over a 45 by 
Wild Willy Barrett, an eccentric hippie chiefly famed for his 
collaboration with 70s pub rocker John Otway. The record collector's 
mind is at work here - revelling in the obscure, celebrating the 
authentic, and finding release in a three-minute song.

Peel has been a DJ since 1963, working in the US for a number of radio 
stations before joining Radio 1 from its birth in 1968. He has the 
freedom to play what he likes, and what tends to make it through is 
anything that fulfils a degree of honesty, be that a scratchy old reggae 
45 or the latest student union indie favourite. A few records have moved 
beyond work into the realm of the intensely personal. "I've got a clutch 
of about 20 records which I'll grab in an emergency, and which will go 
into the grave with me," Peel explains. They're all 45s, they're all 
impossibly obscure, and each one, says Peel, "can almost always reduce 
me to tears".

Within this sacred box, there's a Jagger-Richards composition, I'd 
Rather Be Out with the Boys, by mid-1960s Manchester no-hit wonders the 
Toggery Five; and a great reggae take on Paul Simon's Richard Cory by 
Jamaican singer Yami Boro, who, not quite understanding the words of the 
song, called it Richer Cory. "There's a reggae version of Whiter Shade 
of Pale which does the same thing," says Peel, "but the lyrics of that 
song were complete bollocks anyway, so misinterpreting them just adds 
another dimension."

There are also a number of heartbreaking early-70s soul ballads. In one, 
Stanley Winston's No More Ghettos in America, the singer's voice quivers 
before collapsing into feverish falsetto. "This is the only record this 
guy made," Peel explains, just as Winston breaks down entirely. "You 
hear somebody like Mick Hucknall described as a soul singer after his 
25th LP. This guy made this one 45 and the first 30 seconds eclipses 
Hucknall's entire output." And each of these records tells a story in 
Peel's life - such as the R'n'B classic You'd Better Move On by Arthur 
Alexander. "It was given to me by a girlfriend in Texas, and I think it 
was a hint. Her way of saying, 'Suit action to the title, fatboy.' "

A British institution, John Peel, like so many music lovers, is a 
sentimentalist at heart, a man who can live through his most valued 
vinyl finds. "I'll play them all together one day," he says of his 20 
moments of greatness, "and then go mad."