The sort-of-pointless Marlon Brando search...

[mr_maudlin]

Since I discovered the Peel Wiki site last year I've been going through the available shows from 1979-80 hoping that I could pinpoint the time I first started listening to Peel. The compilation tapes I have start in August 1980 but I know I was listening before then, albeit intermittently.

My first recollection of Peel is tuning in as a 15 year old on the recommendation of a school friend and hearing him back announce a track with the words "well that one certainly mentions Marlon Brando..."

I have to say I was a little confused (and intimidated) by what was going on. Here was this DJ who sounded like no other DJ I'd ever heard, playing an extremely strange selection of tracks, moving from  the UK Subs to Prince Far I to Little Feat without any comment on the seeming (to me) incongruity of playing this stuff side by side. 

I have to admit that I don't think I tuned again for a good few months and have always been a bit embarrassed by the fact.

Anyway, back to the sort-of-pointless search; by last night I had got to the track listing for 28 June 1979 and low and behold someone had taken the trouble to make a note that JP does an impression of Marlon Brando during the show. Sure enough, after playing Neil Young's Pocahontas , Peely states "surely the only mention in popular song of Marlon Brando...".  I assume what then happened is that listeners wrote in with examples to prove him wrong and these were then played in subsequent programmes; when I first tuned in I must have caught the end of one of those tracks.

Well, it was a eureka moment for me and I spent the rest of the evening in the warm glow of nostalgia.

Many thanks to the original recorder, the ripper (that can't be right can it?) and the wiki editor.  
Cheers, Mark.