Remembering pirate radio legend John Peel (1939 - 2004)
As we enter the year 2024 we receive a sad reminder that twenty years have now passed since the sudden death of the BBC radio deejay John Peel. He died while on holiday in Peru in October 2004. All too early we had lost a popular and respected broadcaster whose eclectic taste in multiple genres of pop music had elevated him to the status of cult hero across a wide spectrum of listeners. There simply had been no one like him until, given free rein on the pirate radio station Radio London in 1967, John (originally from Liverpool) became a groundbreaker with his chatty, witty, sardonic and sometimes self-deprecating style of broadcasting pop music. Until his arrival on the UK airwaves deejays simply didn’t, or were not allowed, his informal way of introducing the records that he chose to play, punctuated by random anecdotes, comments, jokes and snippets of poetry or extracts from A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories.
As we enter the year 2024 we receive a sad reminder that twenty years have now passed since the sudden death of the BBC radio deejay John Peel. He died while on holiday in Peru in October 2004. All too early we had lost a popular and respected broadcaster whose eclectic taste in multiple genres of pop music had elevated him to the status of cult hero across a wide spectrum of listeners. There simply had been no one like him until, given free rein on the pirate radio station Radio London in 1967, John (originally from Liverpool) became a groundbreaker with his chatty, witty, sardonic and sometimes self-deprecating style of broadcasting pop music. Until his arrival on the UK airwaves deejays simply didn’t, or were not allowed, his informal way of introducing the records that he chose to play, punctuated by random anecdotes, comments, jokes and snippets of poetry or extracts from A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories.
If nocturnal listening to Radio Luxembourg had worn out the batteries of our transistor radios in the early 1960s how many of us happily stayed awake between midnight and 2pm during the summer of 1967 to hear John Peel on his nightly Perfumed Garden romp through music as varied as blues, jazz, psychedelia and rock n’roll. It wasn’t just that John played freaky underground flower-power tracks like Hyacinth Threads by Orange Bicycle or Flower Man and 14-Hour Technicolour Dream by Syn; nor just that he introduced us to the exciting USA west coast music of groups like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe & Fish. No – John happily and daringly flouted all the rules: he thought nothing of playing a whole side or both sides of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper LP without interruption or of playing tapes of listeners’ unpublished songs such as The Perfumed Garden Blues by Geoffrey Prowse and Granny Takes a Trip by the Purple Gang.
To find a John Peel local connection we need look no further than the night of 6th November 1967 when John presented a concert by the Incredible String Band at Crayford Town Hall. It was a transitional and uncertain time in John’s broadcasting career. The government had passed the Marine Offences Bill closing down the pirate radio stations on 15th August 1967. John was out of a job and was not even sure whether he and the other pirate deejays would be arrested when setting foot on the UK mainland. To his relief he was offered a post at the newly launched BBC Radio One pop station. But would his style fit with the BBC, still affectionately known as ‘Auntie’ for its perceived staid and unadventurous formula of broadcasting? Within a short time John was reunited with his faithful former pirate radio following of listeners and on BBC Radio One in 1968 and 1969 he was attracting lots of new ones with his popular Night Ride programme. The rest, we can truly say, was history.
A history that abruptly ended, sad to say, twenty years ago in 2004. But John most certainly is not forgotten.
A history that abruptly ended, sad to say, twenty years ago in 2004. But John most certainly is not forgotten.