I spend two weeks in the hot spa tubs of Budapest and...

[ken garner]

...just got back to uk from holiday and have now caught up on all the 
astonishing correspondence here via my aged dad's PC. First of all, 
yes, the seller of the tapes had evidently tried to email me but this 
was after I left the country, sorry. But it all worked out ok, thanks 
to dee dee, rocker and everyone. And despite pledging my twenty quid 
in advance, I also appear to have missed the cough-up period, sorry. 
I agree with Mark, these are probably low-Q FM recordings rather than 
AM, as Martin says, yes, from October 71 all Peel's late evening 
shows (excluding the first 9 months of 75, the BBC '3-day week' 
period) were on the Radio 2 FM frequency as well as R1 AM, until R1 
FM for almost 24 hrs launched in Oct 88 anyway. Some friends gave me 
their prized shoeboxes of Peel show tapes (about 30 tapes in all, 
mostly 79-81, I think) when I was doing In Session Tonight, taped on 
a stereo system, but time and decay made them v muffled, although 
they can be listened to just about (actually I wonder if I still have 
those somewhere...?). AM recordings at 10pm-midnight would be v 
crackly, possibly. Like others, I am happy to hear shows in any 
quality short of unlistenable, and not just for what Peel says, but 
for the totality of the experience, and simply to know they survive. 

I am sure it has occurred to others that those doing the digitising 
not only need to agree on a digital file format standard (which 
appears to have been done 
already!), but also a cataloguing system and application. Whoever is 
doing the divvying out needs to give each tape a clear number before 
the digitising gets under way. Then there are the agreed fields of 
data required for each tape (date, duration, featured items, running 
order?, 
notes, edits, etc.. to be discussed), and the application: You could 
use a database, if there is one that everyone is likely to have which 
is simple, or (don't snigger), excel is pretty universal, I did both 
books' sessionography in it and my big bro does mutliple data daily 
for an international engineering company with excel files containing 
thousands and thousands of entries or rows, all relating to each 
other, so it can do almost anything we'd want, as long as we agreed 
on the fields or columns, surely? I think you would need two 
spreadsheets that talked to each other: one with a single row of 
agreed main data for each every TAPE/ SHOW; then one which was an 
individual 
sheet for each TAPE / SHOW with the full track listing and any notes, 
even maybe a field for transcribing Peel's links... Just a thought...

On the continuing issue of some kind of eventual Peel Archive online, 
I too have been mulling this over. I think for the time being let's 
just share the stuff and document what is out there and is emerging. 
Eventually, though, I suspect something might be possible. A friend 
of mine, a professor at a with-it institution, has been advising the 
BBC on its digital strategy and claims their new objective is to 
liase with and facilitate other social networks, and not try to do it 
all themselves. However, in that context the (incomplete, out of date 
and frequently bonkers) 'official' peel pages occasionally accessible 
via Radio 1's website are a peculiar exception! And so would be the 
rumour I have heard from inside sources recently that BBC Worldwide 
is working on a project to create a website where people can listen 
to and purchase for download BBC session tracks (not just Peel's, 
please note!), both current and from the archive. But there is a 
world of difference between doing this for discrete, identifiable 
copyright tracks by named artists, and complete show recordings of 
variable quality: even if that rumour is true, I doubt they would 
even contemplate the enormity of the task of making complete shows 
available in this manner. But for someone else to stream a rotating 
sequence of archive shows might be possible even under existing 
copyright legislation, if the BBC chose to recognise the credibility 
of the organisation doing it (it sells TV shows for repeats by any TV 
channel in the world, so why not...?). If we were to demonstrate our 
capacity to do this by how we deal with these new tapes, for example, 
that might go some way to helping. Any such official website / 
archive / association project would of course need the BBC, Radio 1, 
Sheila's and the Selwoods' consent. But if we got the last two, or 
even three, of those, then the institional support from the top of 
the organisation might just fall into line, eventually. I can 
envisage some form of 
trust /association being recognised by these stakeholders. Such a 
site 
could then be much more than that and grow data organically, with 
eventually a data entry for every show, which would indicate if it is 
known to exist in any of the public or private archives we can 
identify (and thereby request and identify those that are missing 
from any visitors to the site).

I feel, however, as I say, that's all some way off in the future. The 
first step towards any such formal recognition or credibility of this 
group as the official custodians of the Peel legacy/archive - 
(alongside how we deal with the tapes!) - might be perhaps some form 
of face to face meeting, a Peel Listeners' Convention, which could 
seek, among other fun things (gigs, guests, debates, etc), to 
finalise and ratify a draft constitution or terms-of-reference 
articulating the association's aims, membership, and so on, which 
could be circulated in draft electronically in advance. Sounds 
dreary, i know, but if we were to decide to be truly serious about 
this (including maybe seeking national lottery funding - I am not 
joking, there have been other digital musical archiving projects that 
have won cash from this source!), we'd need to do that kind of 
thing...

ken