Author:David Cavanagh
Sub-titled ‘How 35 years of John Peel helped to shape modern life’, this book was published in 2015. I read it at the time and corresponded briefly with the author, having felt moved to tell him how much I appreciated – as someone who has written research-heavy books myself – the sheer amount of work involved (which may not be apparent to many readers, so light was his touch as a writer) in it, and the subtle qualities of the end product.
What David did was cherry-pick / randomly sample (there was an element of both, I think) over 250 radio shows fronted by Peel spanning 1967 (the last days of ‘The Perfumed Garden’ on pirate radio) to 2003 (the last days of Peel). His sources included tapes of broadcasts (with comments by Peel on the state of the world, his health, his views on this or that artist peppering the text), ‘Programme as Broadcast’ files kept on microfiche at BBC Written Records (showing exactly what was played and when), period interviews with Peel and a few of the artists he championed at various times (all used sparingly) and extracts from general news stories of the day to give the reader context. Occasionally, these news stories impact or are reflected in the content of the show that day.
David’s skill was as a curator of all this information. Often, having given a summary of artists played and a paragraph of news, he will take one act or style of music featured on that show and use this as a point from which to look at a ‘narrative arc’ spanning a few weeks or months – Peel’s engagement with this or that artist / type of music, his standing at Radio 1 at the time, the career path of that artist (from Peel session(s) to stardom, and whether they bothered to keep in touch) and suchlike. There is a still greater narrative arc, of sorts, throughout the whole book – although with Peel, there was no goal as such, no end point. He was a very curious man (in both senses) who just kept looking for music that pressed some sort of button for him – it was irrelevant if that annoyed his listeners, his employers, his colleagues…
In the early days of Radio 1, he was a hep cat whose tastes happened to more or less (Wild Man Fischer, Captain Beefheart etc aside) with ‘the underground’ or counterculture.
Length of Read:Long
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
Subtitled ‘How 35 years of John Peel helped to shape modern life’, this book was published in 2015. I read it at the time and corresponded briefly with the author, having felt moved to tell him how much I appreciated – as someone who has written research-heavy books myself – the sheer amount of work involved (which may not be apparent to many readers, so light was his touch as a writer) in it, and the subtle qualities of the end product. Having re-read it, I felt moved – for different reasons – to write about it here, to remind people it’s there.
What David did was cherry-pick / randomly sample (there was an element of both, I think) over 250 radio shows fronted by Peel spanning 1967 (the last days of ‘The Perfumed Garden’ on pirate radio) to 2003 (the last days of Peel). (A draft of the book had many more shows sampled, but he whittled this down to what was still a 600+ page tome.) His sources included tapes of broadcasts (with comments by Peel on the state of the world, his health, his views on this or that artist peppering the text), ‘Programme as Broadcast’ files kept on microfiche at BBC Written Records in Caversham (showing exactly what was played and when), period interviews with Peel and a few of the artists he championed at various times (all used deftly) and extracts from general news stories of the day to give the reader context. There are, wisely in my view, no fresh interviews with artists or associates telling us what a great guy/visionary he was; this is purely ‘as it happened’.
Occasionally, these general news stories impacted on or are reflected in the content of the show that day and on Peel’s expressed views. Peel was fairly reserved in expressing his opinions on wider world matters – a wry remark here or there – but sometimes, just occasionally, he used his platform. On one occasion he calls out the sexist content of a record/session track and bans it from further plays, but then, as David points out, some months later he plays something far worse in this respect and makes no comment.
David’s skill is as a curator of all the information he corralled and as a spotter of themes and contradictions (on Peel’s part) across many years. Often, having given a summary of artists played and a paragraph of news, he will take one act or style of music featured on that show and use this as a point from which to look at a ‘narrative arc’ spanning a few weeks or months – Peel’s engagement with this or that artist / type of music, his standing at Radio 1 at the time, the career path of that artist (from Peel session(s) to stardom, and whether they bothered to keep in touch and how that played out) and suchlike.
There is a still greater narrative arc, of sorts, throughout the whole book – although with Peel, there was no goal as such, no end point. It was a journey with no destination – and loads of wrong turns. He was a very curious man (in both senses) who just kept looking for music that pressed some sort of button for him – and David has a theory on what that was (I’ll let you read the book) – it was irrelevant if that annoyed his listeners, his employers, his colleagues…
In the early days of Radio 1, Peel was a hep cat with a Dylan the Rabbit vibe whose tastes happened to more or less (Wild Man Fischer, Captain Beefheart etc. aside) cohere with ‘the underground’ or counterculture of that time. He shared this cultural space with several other, mostly forgotten, DJs at Radio 1 at this time – Alan Black, Mike Harding (no, not that one), Bob Harris, Tommy Vance, David Symonds – although within four or five years he had outlasted them all. (Vance and Harris would of course come back to the station in later years and carve out their own niches; the others drifted into obscurity – because, beyond Luxembourg, there was nowhere else to go at that time.)
In the mid-70s, he was a slightly bored man playing flabby yacht rock, as we might call it now, albeit peppering his shows with sessions by occasional folk singers and reggae artists. In the punk era, his interest in music was rejuvenated – though Cavanagh’s research underlines that the idea that John ditched his old listeners overnight and went straight to punk is a complete myth (one peddled by Peel himself in retrospective interviews). It took two years at least, and he never cared for the Pistols or the Clash – while still always caring for those folk singers and reggae bands.
Cavanagh’s coverage of the years subsequent to punk show that John Peel’s tastes and those of his listeners would never align completely. Even though he championed the wet and wibbly ‘C86’ acts, he was exasperated when his listeners filled his ‘Festive 50’ with such people. Did they not care for all that other stuff he played too? No, seemingly not. This was a pattern that would continue.
Somehow, John Peel survived at Radio 1, though at times he was clearly viewed as an awkward uncle at a school disco or, worse, a contrary embarrassment at odds with the wacky, upbeat, vacuous sheen of the rest of the station. Having kept his head down during the purge of the flatulent, flabby, entitled old dinosaurs in David Essex 1978 Tour bomber jackets (DLT, Simon Bates, Adrian Bloody Juste et al.) he was dangerously exposed in the early 90s when, inexplicably, he was asked to cover holiday leave for ‘Jakki’ Brambles at lunchtime for a week. Cavanagh covers this in excruciating depth – a cruelty to both Peel, Brambles’ listeners and all concerned. Peel was out of his depth in the sunlight and just didn’t have the sense or understanding to try and be fit for the purpose he was being asked to fulfil, while Gary Davies was boorish and frosty on the handovers.
While this was a case of square peg/round hole, it allows us to appreciate that Peel was not only that mad uncle locked in the turret at midnight but also in some respects a spoilt child, who had got used to playing whatever he wanted in an environment of his own value systems and judgements against the world. He comes across as a man who simply didn’t understand why people didn’t like the increasingly extreme, unmusical stuff he was playing – as David explains, not even dance connoisseurs (and none of those people were listening to his shows anyway, he states) cared for the yobbish 500bpm ‘happy hardcore’ he kept playing let alone Extreme Noise Terror et al.
One thing that comes across from David’s presentation of facts, observations and transcriptions is that Peel almost never promoted himself, his ‘brand’. David points out at one stage that he was earning in a year what Mike Read was making in half a dozen personal appearances. Move that comparison on into the era of the star dance DJ (where people who spin records at raves earn ludicrous sums), and one can’t help thinking that John – with such a diffident personality, shyness or whatever it was – was missing a trick. One feels that he could somehow have ‘monetised’ his brand much more, had he been that sort of person. But he wasn’t.
In his last few years at Radio 1 / on the planet, in which he was also presenting his avuncular non-musical ‘Home Truths’ show on Radio 4 – to the great chagrin of his former producer John Walters – there is at last a feeling that the station has understood that he is a ‘national treasure’ – the sort of totem figure that money can’t buy, even if he clashes with the current decor. It makes special arrangements for him to broadcast from home instead of obliging him to stay in crappy hotels (that he has had to pay for himself) overnight between his two weekend shows, as his health can’t deal with the late-night two-hour car journey home.
Amazingly, even in later years, Peel was still buying many of the records he played on air – David gives one example of the worm turning, on air, at one point when a listener writes to ask why he hasn’t played anything from the new Nirvana album, having promoted them early on. Simple – their record label hasn’t sent it to him. John (in a rare moment of righteous anger) ranted on air about this and refused to buy it. Good for him.
This behaviour by labels – along with them denying access for a new session to artists he had championed (the labels wanting only sessions on Steve Lamacq’s show or nothing) – was, amazingly, a common pattern in the 90s. ‘Early plays on Peel? Great – now forget him, he’s small fry.’ Even the White Stripes’ label at a certain point permits him to play only two tracks from a new album ahead of release. ‘But there are 14 tracks here,’ says Peel, simply not able to understand this – somehow unable to grasp that if he plays everything at this point in time, it will be taped and all over the internet. In that instance, Peel huffed and didn’t play two tracks from it – he played an old White Stripes B-side instead. We’re not sure how Jack White would have felt in that instance. As a friend and admirer of John’s – amazed to meet a man who knew Son House (persuading Peel to rebroadcast his 1970 Son House session) – he might have sympathised and felt embarrassed at his label’s attitude. But he might also have understood that simply giving away an album’s worth of music weeks ahead of its release in the internet era was a bridge too far.
Ironically, for a man obsessed seemingly with the music of today (or at least that bit of it that excited him), he was in some ways stuck in the past – the past where a man on the radio could play whole albums (and he always preferred vinyl to CD) if that’s what he felt like doing, and had done in the mid-70s several times, from Fripp & Eno’s ‘No Pussyfooting’ onwards – albeit, backwards in that case.
In terms of his musical taste and broadcasting style, he sometimes scorched-earth his own past – deciding that he didn’t like most of what he played in this or that era any more, and was appalled by his own broadcasting style and hippy-dippy attitudes. I’ve always found this problematic. Yes, we all have tastes and, to an extent, personalities that evolve. But to chuck out colossal amounts of the musical past, a past that you have wholeheartedly championed, feels phoney and shallow to me. Yes, he stayed loyal to a few artists of yore – Martin Carthy, June Tabor, Captain Beefheart, Kevin Coyne… – but this tendency to rave about something and then pretend it never happened a few years later (including his own accent and presentational style, which changed three or more times, from sleepy Dylan the Rabbit spreading love and whimsy to sardonic Liverpool yobbo with a hint of Birmingham) is unattractive. Why should we trust him now? He’ll only tell us it was a pile of crap next year.
There are undoubtedly PhD theses in all this – not least because the singular interest in John Peel, of all British radio presenters, has ensured that a vast number of his shows, from 1967 onward, survive. That in itself is a PhD question: why have significant amounts of John Peel broadcasts spanning 35 years survived, recorded off-air by successive generations of fans, when almost nothing by his peers has? You will search for those David ‘Diddy’ Hamilton shows in vain. (Peel himself had little active interest in the survival of even sessions for his shows beyond their initial repeats, though he did collaborate with his old pal Clive Selwood in the release of many sessions from the mid-80s onward via Strange Fruit. I recall phoning him at the BBC in the early 90s about Pentangle sessions – you could do that in those days; he was friendly but revealed, ‘I’ve no idea where the tapes are kept…’ He seemed faintly surprised at my interest.) Add that to the PasB files at Caversham, the various music mag columns he wrote, the ongoing fan cult, the demonstrable influence he had on the music business/popular taste (with several massive ‘bullseyes’ in this regard, in among the vast slews of nonentities, weirdos, ‘period pieces’ and decent ‘minority interest’ acts that made up the bulk of his shows)…
At the very end of the book, David Cavanagh names 15 acts that John Peel championed – not played once or twice, but really got behind in a significant way very early in their careers and sometimes for a few years into them – and tells us that their record sales equal 1.5 billion.
He was a man of contradictions, and if you were a listener, he was never a reliable champion of whatever you liked – whatever that was, he would soon move on. Although ticking many of the ‘good bloke’ boxes, there are one or two awkward questions about aspects of his life and values here and there. He was a star-maker – no question, several acts whose careers might arguably have stiffed early on were midwifed into the public consciousness via his shows – but he still managed to seem, to the music industry well into the 90s, to be an insignificant, eccentric man playing records around midnight to nobody listening. Yet even though he explicitly hoped his latest faves would become hugely popular (without ever saying or thinking ‘This is my remit – to make tomorrow’s stars’, which was almost certainly the whole ethos behind Steve Lamacq’s show) – and couldn’t understand why, at that moment, they weren’t – it was very often the case that once they became popular, he lost interest.
Just as John Peel, to a great extent, simply played the music and let it speak for itself, bar the odd wry one-liner before or after, David Cavanagh lays out his findings and observations without a ‘thesis’ – occasionally he asks rhetorical questions in the light of something from a given show, occasionally he’ll advance a theory, but generally he lets the evidence speak for itself. We can come to our own conclusions – about the man, the music, specific musicians, the station, the record industry…
David Cavanagh stepped in front of a train on 27 December 2018 – having reportedly opted not to disrupt anyone’s Christmas by doing so on 23 December, when his mind was made up. He was an acclaimed writer, but had money worries. There isn’t much money in writing – trust me. Maybe he could see that at 54, with music magazines a busted flush and a 5 to 8 grand advance at best for two years’ work on your next book, it was all over.
Some people aren’t great at doings things other than the thing they love, and win awards at. The same might be said of John Peel. What would he have done had he been ‘let go’ circa 1972, with the clear-out of Alan Black, Mike Harding, David Symonds & co.? Or pushed out with the Smashy & Nicey crowd in the 80s? No commercial radio station would have let him go to the extremes he did in the 90s at Radio 1 – he would have been obliged to fit into genre constraints: a reggae show, a folk show, an indie show, a world music show, a metal show – but not all of it thrown together. He wouldn’t have understood that. Maybe like Bob Harris, he would have crept back to Radio 2 a few years later and been grateful for an hour on one night a week, like a gnarlier version of David Jacobs in his later years – a legend from decades past allowed to do his thing (or a version of it) for nostalgists once a week. Who knows?
All we have now are the shows – hundreds of them, in full or in part, shared online – and the sessions, still crawling from under floorboards into the sunlight of digital restoration and boxed sets to this day, often 50+ years after the event. As an example, I’ve recently completed work on a 6CD upgrade of ‘The Pretty Things at the BBC’ (originally a 4CD set on Repertoire in 2015). Even in the last five years, around 40 ‘new’ session tracks, many from Peel shows, have come to light. Whether Peel, were he around today, would have played a track or two had the set landed on his desk is a moot point. Maybe, maybe not. If he did, he would – as he did in towards the end when he deigned to rebroadcast an old Captain Beefheart session that fans had saved – have surely trimmed out his whimsical spoken intros. But those intros, I can assure you, are retained in such box sets wherever possible – a magical reminder of a time that’s gone. Peel would have been appalled at the very idea.
One thing you’ve learned
That a DJ’s lot is often not a happy one.
Apologies for three paras being repeated at the start. Mods, if you could…
No matter, that’s a fascinating read Colin, and I speak as someone who never fully bought into Peel – I listened from time to time, and enjoyed him as a broadcaster but rarely followed him on his changes of taste. The point about the transition to punk being less overnight than legend might have it is well made – my memory of the late 70s is that he was still playing Rose of Cimmaron by Poco and was an early champion of Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits.
Lovely piece, Colin. I’ve mentioned this before on here, but there were many, many occasions when David Cavanagh and I walked past each other in Brighton and Hove. He’d contacted me years ago when researching that mighty Creation Records tome, and I didn’t respond, because I was long out of the music journo world, and had no interest in harking back to it. So in the end we never actually spoke, diffidence or whatever also getting in the way. I really do regret that. Such a sad scenario.
Wonderful piece Colin. I read the book when it was released and throughly enjoyed it. It is so very sad that a man with such an obvious talent as David’s had to end his life because the very thing he excelled at couldnt make him a living that he deserved. Thanks Colin!
You’re welcome, Bingmeister (and everyone else)! If I wasn’t clear enough about it, the reason that I felt compelled to write something on the book was not because of Peel but because of David – to celebrate a very conscientious, thorough and deft piece of writing and research. Anyone (with the will) could have selected 250+ Peel shows, listed what he played and riffed on that at length… but David pulled the camera lens back, carefully selected a few external sources and made observations from a wider field of vision without clogging up the book with minutiae. That’s a much harder book to write. I’ve dedicated several of my own books to writers living and dead – including the late Ian MacDonald, who also took his own life, perhaps for reasons similar to David’s (I speculate there). I’m all for keeping their work alive and appreciated. 🙂
I must admit I have never read one of David Cavanagh’s books but you have made me want to put that right Colin. So sad when someone like him, or indeed Ian MacDonald, feels they have to end their lives.
Recall reading the book and there was a lot in it. The research and attention to detail was on show.
Didn’t realise David Kavanagh was no longer with us, and certainly not in the circumstances you mention.
To pick up on the “discarding his past” bit – I think he was always looking to move forward, always looking for the next record to change his life, and it can be seen that he just dropped people on a whim.
The most important point about John Peei is that he would play some great music that you would not hear anywhere else and that fact trumped everything else about him as a broadcaster, like him or loathe him. His appeal was mostly to teenage boys, so the majority of his audience moved on when they were in their 20s, but they were replaced by teenage boys.
I don’t particularly like him as a broadcaster or as a person, but I have a huge amount to thank him for.
I think the teenage thing is why so many shows survive off-air from 1967-70 – and then they drop off a cliff for 3-4 years until the punk era. The first lot of teenagers grew up / went to university or had other calls on their time, but the flabby early to mid 70s didn’t inspire too many people to take their places.
From what I remember of Radio 1 in the mid 70s, you had chart orientated programmes until about 6.00pm. Then Radios 1 and 2 combined and you got Radio 2 shows until the 10.00 to midnight slot which was mostly for rock acts. There was a different DJ each night, Annie Nightingale and Alan Black and possibly Bob Harris were some of the others. Peel eventually got all the days and therefore had no competition. I always thought that his shows were the best. Perhaps he became more special when he had the monopoly.
At one point when he was coming on at 10 that was when Radio 1 switched briefly to FM transmitters, so he had the best SQ on the station for broadcasting. That would be Mon to Thurs with “TV on the radio” Tommy Vance’s rock show on Fri nights.
Wonderful piece, Colin.
Since stopped buying music mags quite a few years back, I had – like RD – no idea
that David C had died, and what’s even sadder had died in such tragic circumstances.
Sure Peel had a habit of dropping acts he’d supported. In fairness, he only did so when he felt they’d found their audience and should make way for interesting new acts he could connect with an audience of their own.
I don’t think that’s the whole story, Jay – I think there was a sort of selfishness – a pathological thing of some sort anyway – to John as a music listener/broadcaster as time went on. That’s not quite the right word, because it implies greed or self-interest on a conscious level – which wasn’t the case, as he quite clearly never lined his own pockets and I’m aware of acts of kindness he made towards people (so it’s not at all an inability to relate to other people’s feelings, so not the autism spectrum) – but I honestly believe there was a kind of ‘mental issue’ of a sort there. An inability to stay true to his tastes. They were constantly being jettisoned.
There was also an inability – a lack of maturity or ‘real politik’ if you prefer – to be respectful to his employer over many years. Yes, Radio 1 treated *him* badly at times, shamefully, in my view, but similarly he seemed often hell bent on stretching his employer’s (and listeners’) tolerance to the limit sometimes. In the psych/prog era he was broadly reflecting what was happening in music outside of the pop charts – but the world was a simpler place then. In the punk and post-punk eras, he was still broadly reflecting what was ‘happening’ outside his studio. But in the later years, he was being wilfully contrary, obscurist and often confrontational in what was getting on to his show. He wasn’t doing ‘public service broadcasting’ any more but ‘I’ll bloody well play this at you if I want’ – and seemed to think it was his right to do that. He was wrong about that, in my view.
This is only a theory, but I know Peel was mortified by the way that Marc Bolan cut him dead once he’d got the pop stardom he wanted, when Peel was hugely responsible for him getting there. I wonder whether, subsequently, Peel got in first and dropped people before they did it to him.
Did he really drop them? He hated commercial T Rex records and said so, Marc Bolan was naturally not happy about that. Later on he just decided he was mainly there to break new artists, don’t think that stopped him from liking lots of the old stuff too, they were just not played very often on his show.
Peel, talking about Bolan in 1993
It’s a difficult area for me this, because Marc and his first wife June had been best friends with my wife Sheila and myself for quite some time. We’d done a lot of things together. But you know how very few friendships last for more than like a few years and people drift apart and people’s priorities change and so on and you suddenly find you have less and less in common. And as Marc became more and more well known, he just started to run with a different crowd. And there wasn’t any kind of row or disagreement or argument at all, but I just saw less and less of him. And it happens quite a bit really in the glamorous world of showbiz, you know, because I’m not a showbiz type and over the years I’ve lost one or two friends to showbiz, and I suppose that’s one of the reasons I don’t have a great deal to do with it now, because you get involved with people and then they suddenly disappear out of your lives and it can be quite upsetting, I suppose. And Marc came along to the BBC one evening with an acetate of I think it was Get It On, or a white label, and left it at reception for me to play on the programme. And I took it up to the studio just before going on the air and listened to it and I thought to myself, “Well, if this wasn’t Marc I’d not play it.” And then I thought to myself, “Well, if that’s the case, then I mustn’t play it.” Because you have to be sort of true to yourself, in a rather fanatical way. And so I didn’t play it, and that was really pretty much the end of that. At that time, Marc was more of a friend with Bob Harris actually, who was on the radio at the time, and used to see more of him. In fact, I only saw him once more from then until his death and that was on a record review programme I think or somewhere, I don’t remember exactly where. Anyway, we were perfectly friendly there, but in a sense it was like meeting someone you’d not met before or like somebody’s older brother or younger brother – it didn’t seem to be the Marc that I’d known particularly well.
Well, I love Peel and the idea of Peel as much as the next guy, but he was utterly wrongity-wrong about Get It On.
I agree.
Can’t believe there are too many people who’ve bought a Bolan collection who have really liked Hot Love and yet completely taken against Get It On!
Surely if you like one, you like the other.
It’s like really loving She Loves You and really hating I Want To Hold Your Hand.
The extraordinary thing to me was that he liked Tyrannosaurus Rex so much – their wibbly warbly wobbly music was wholly unlistenable to my ears!
This is a theme that’s explored a bit in David’s book. He postulates that John had felt he’d had his fingers burned by Marc and so rarely attended session recordings or sought to meet musicians he liked thereafter. It’s a compelling argument.
Lovely, lovely writing Colin. Thank you.
Thank you, Lodey – that’s very kind. The reason there are three paragraphs at the top semi-repeated below is because I started writing direct to the template thinking ‘I’ll throw down a couple of paras just to let people know the book’s still out there and to share my re-reading thumbs up in a sentence… but when it seemed to be rumbling on I thought I’d better write it in a document and copy/paste (in case my net connection wobbled). But I forgot to delete the direct written bit. Oh well. 🙂
Great stuff, Colin.
Oddly enough I glanced upon David Cavanagh’s Creation book on a shelf this morning, thought “it must be about time for another from him” and then remembered. RIP.
Excellent, caring and thoughtful musing there – thanks for posting. He’s the sort of person who invites reflection and remembrances, because he was around for so very long.
I’ve still got a recording of tracks from 2 Peel shows in January 1991 – Moonflowers and Galaxie 500 in session – very evocative, as much for the Peel comments bedding the tracks as the tracks themselves.
I didn’t listen to the shows very often because there was so much I just didn’t care for, but every now and then there would be something wonderful thrown into the mix. The Orb bursting into ‘No Fun’, for example, in the middle of one of their 15+ minute ambient noodlings.
Ah – David mentions that session in the book – though I thought it was another Pistols track they did? Apparently Peel was in a sour mood that night and didn’t seem to appreciate it (or much else that he played on that show).
His reaction when they stopped playing was to chuckle and say “Punk rock, eh? You never know where you are with it, do you?” in the voice of an indulgent uncle. I guess that could be to cover his lack of enthusiasm. It’s hard to tell because of the dry, sardonic way of speaking he often seemed to adopt. It was quite different from the earnest style he had when you could tell he was being sincere and interested in a subject.
I didn’t have a problem with him playing happy hardcore, ENT or underachieving indie, because I think by that time, he’d created enough space on the radio schedule for others to come after him and play the more conventional alternative music that listeners knew they wanted to hear. Pioneers in music aren’t popular because they are doing something extreme, something radically different. We like a certain amount of familiarity in our music, as well as a soupçon of novelty, like in all aspects of culture. Few people enjoy a bowlful of habanero chili peppers, but a few seeds or fragments of flesh liven up a regular dish for a jaded palette. I think it’s the same reason why you get silly experimentation at fashion shows – few will eat/wear/listen to those things, but a watered-down version will carry enough memory of the initial shock to give warmth to the palette/eyes/ears.
If anyone else here is inspired to follow up on Colin’s piece, AUK has DC’s Peel book for just £4.97 on Kindle
Or a couple of quid in any chazza, when they finally reopen.
Would imagine people who bought this sort of book (i.e the likes of us!) would be inclined to hang on to it for future reference. I know I would. Either way, doubt very much whether I’d find a copy in my local Sue Ryder here in Royston Vaizey
Well, it was a charity shop staple before DC died, that’s where I got mine. I bought my copy of the Creation book in a wholesaler’s table top sale for a quid. It took me years to open it and once I did I wondered why it had taken me so long – probably because I believed McGee’s “it isn’t very good” hype.
DC was loved by us but he wasn’t a household name.
The selective/discerning nature of DC’s target audience (the likes of us, as mentioned earlier) is the reason I find it so bizarre one might find a fairly niche title like GNAGR in a charity shop to begin with.
Obviously you get a better class of Sue Ryder round your way than you do here in the arse-end of Ireland – typical title Clodagh Rodgers My Struggle
It’s a Clodestone of wrongness
@Colin-H
Other big sellers at our local Sue R shop’s extensive Clodagh section (just to the left of the Dana books) include
The Clod Delusion
and
The Clodavinci Code
All of which reminds me of the news story that ran when charity shops started turning away Max Bygraves Singalonga records.
Their decision for doing so was that anyone who might bv interested in listening to one was no longer around to do so
That is a lovely piece of writing, Colin: you have persuaded me to buy this. I agree about the teenage audience: I followed the Peel show intensely for a while but in my 20s I wasn’t listening to night-time radio. In my memory, I also got bored with the underachieving indie music he kept playing throughout the 90s, but perhaps I wasn’t listening properly: I’ll check the book.
David Cavanagh’s book on Creation Records was also a magnificent music history; so much better than the Alan McGee memoir that we are expected to dote on.
This is a superb review and very poignant celebration of David Cavanagh. It would be a fitting preface to a reprint.
I loved the Creation book which was a rare blend of heft, forensic detail and readability. I had the impression that ‘Good Night…’ was a little more than a compilation of playlists and so it passed me by on release, despite my interest in Peel and appetite for something more substantial and less smug than his autobiography. This excellent overview has me scuttling straight to the online behemoth to purchase a Kindle edition. Thanks Mr C!
The Creation book is mentioned on the Rocks Back Pages podcast with Alan McGee. Apparently he upset McGee with a snide comment, so in retaliation he called Paolo Hewitt and asked him to write a Creation book and to complete it in 2 months. This meant that both books were out at the same time thus decreasing his sales.
I heard this on the Rock’s Back Pages podcast. I knew previously that McGee wasn’t a fan of Cavanagh’s book as he has discredited it in the past, however, i didn’t realise their falling out was over something so petty. McGee comes across very badly in that anecdote……sanctioning an inferior book just to spite Cavanagh, who must have put in years of work on his book.
Hepworth and Ellen’s Word podcast 243 is devoted to this book and before a live audience Mr Cavanagh talks at length about matters Peelish. Your write-up makes a great companion piece.
I just listened to this. Poor guy wasn’t just constantly interrupted by Messrs Hepworth and Ellen, but also Trevor Dann.
Great piece above by @Colin-H
i was a big fan of “Peelie” in the late 70s and early 80s when our tastes in music more or less matched. Listened to him less as I got older, but I was always glad he was there.
I also read the very perceptive article about Ian McCulloch at the time. Very sad that he chose to end his own life soon after. clearly he must have been suffering with mental illness, money problems can’t be the only factor when something like that happens.
He turned me on to the Cure when I was 14 going on 15. Seventeen Seconds album. Major album for me at the time.
He had holidays in the Sun and Satellite in his top 10- so he must have liked the Sex Pistols- its says here!
Plus he played Never Mind The Bollocks in full (except for Bodies) on release, I probably still have the cassette in my loft. No one forced him to do that.
I remember clearly listening one evening and him playing Holidays In The Sun and introducing it as his favourite Pistols song. Afterwards he uttered some form of superlative also.
Great review. I love this book. So much so I bought and read it twice, first on kindle and then on paper because I wanted the real thing. The subtitle is over the top (perhaps a publisher decision to make the book seem less niche) and does it a bit of a disservice because its scope, nor its aim, nor Peel’s influence outside of a certain demographic, isn’t that huge, but it’s a wonderful, evocative read and cleverly and carefully put together.
Wish someone would reissue Cavanagh’s brilliant Creation book. Took it out of the library 20 (!) years ago and was delighted that the music of my teenage years (House of Love, Felt, Teenage Fanclub) was getting the full mainstream-publisher attention, although it was obviously the Oasis story that got it published. Currently 60 quid second-hand on Amazon so I’ll have to wait.
He also wrote an amazing piece on Ian McCulloch a few years ago. It’s a pretty heartbreaking profile of someone facing age and diminishing returns. Must have been written shortly before he died and so it’s particularly sad with hindsight given there might have been something of himself in the portrait.
David also wrote a wonderful eulogy to Prince in Uncut, one of the most heartfelt and affecting pieces in the plethora of articles after his death in 2016.
Peel’s manifesto as it were, was to play the stuff that no one else played that he felt deserved recognition. Once the acts got successful he saw no need to play their songs anymore. He genuinely believed, as he said, that if those records he championed got enough exposure, on TOTP and daytime radio, people would like them as much as him, it was just that those acts didn’t get a chance. It is a peculiar way to make a living but the dedication was there in the mad attempt to listen to all the demos he got sent. It’s not as peculiar as the standard radio 1 DJ way of making a living though in all it’s sleazy and infantile glory. To be fair Peel did have a slice of that cake as well, for a while. The book mentions TOTP appearances, which he was pretty good at, bringing his sardonic approach to proceedings in a memorable way, appearing with the more Peel-friendly DJs. That was usually fun. It wasn’t all dour, earnest trawling for arty, indie 45s.
I agree – his TOTP appearances, especially with Jensen, were always fun. From memory (of the shows and from the book), these were about once a month over a period of 4-5 years in the early 80s – so, not that many appearances, but they stick in the memory. David reveals that he had first intro’d TOTP on one occasion in 1968, but it was a disaster (forgetting Amen Corner’s name on air or something like that) and he wasn’t invited back… for a decade or more.
@Colin_H
Thanks for the detailed response re JP’s changing tastes (probably a better way to put it but I’m in a bit of a rush!)
Remember reading about the time he was on with – I think – Janice Long, who welcomed some former teen idol on the comeback trail with the words “I used to have him on my bedroom wall!” To which JP replied in his inimitably droll way “Well that was very athletic of you, Janice”
While can\t find that clip, I did find this which relates back to your tale about the lengthy – 14-year gap between his first and second appearances on TOTP
Fascinating! He sounded in good form there.
I saw David promoting this very book in Walthamstow in 2015.
A memorable evening and a book I return to regularly.
The list of artists in an average show c. 1968 is essentially the array of CDs on my shelf… Doors, Zappa, Beefheart, Bonzos…
Gambo said of Peel that he’d heard more pop music than any other individual in the world could possibly have listened to, which has to be right if you think about it.
In a later documentary on him he seemed to have gone full circle, getting ridiculously attached to old Roy Orbison 45s… pretty much where I am at the moment!
Maybe less is more.
I know what you mean about less is more. I was never really into John Peel, although I was a teenager in the late 80s/early 90s so the ideal age really. In the early 90s I preferred Mark and Lard. John Peel just always seemed too scattershot – playing everything without any quality control. At least that’s how it seemed to me.
There’s a good reason why wide-ranging shows with no remit are not as popular as shows with a theme and focus!
Indeed. He became self-indulgent – which is what I was trying and failing to say at length in one of my answers above! 😀
Thanks all for the kind comments, by the way. Unexpected! I wrote a few thousand words on the history of ‘the BBC radio session’, in general, in the rock era for a long-gestating BBC box set on a certain artiste. I hope it will appear later this year, though I’m not holding my breath.
Here’s the rarely heard JRR Tolkien Peel session from 1968 (okay, not really):
Just a reminder that you can find nearly 600 Peel shows here:
Thanks for that!
We used to listen to John Peel after lights out at school at some ridiculous age, 13 or 14, so perhaps when he had an early evening show, 9 rather than after 10. I have a vivid recollection of the Albion Country, maybe Dance, Band guesting, playing some electric Morris tunes. (Not Morris On, in case anyone eager to guess.) I became hooked both on the music, no great jump as I already liked Fairport, and convinced Peel could do no wrong. I was wrong about the latter, as I learnt a few years later, using his show to lull myself to sleep. Which worked but had the fella upstairs then knocking the floor, waking me because it was keeping him awake.
I trust you have this @retropath2. Various Albions at the BBC.
https://mainlynorfolk.info/guvnor/records/bbcsessions.html
I remember hearing ‘Poor Old Horse’ on Peel.
S bates record of the week as I recall.
The session I heard, through some dogged hunting, was probably this: 5/9/72, so I was 15.
https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/05_September_1972
Good show overall in hindsight.
And the Strickland blogspot/website doesn’t yet include it, having just had a wallow in those it does.
I doubt “the cheeks of her arse going chuff, chuff, chuff” would have been acceptable on wunnerful Radio One!
tis true.
“Poor Old Horse” was released as a single in 1978 (Harvest: HAR 5156) and named as “Record of the Week” by the BBC Radio 1’s Simon Bates, but made no impact on the charts.
It was a lovely piece, Colin, and I’m not ashamed to admit I was very much a Peel fan from about mid 76 to the late 80s. As a teenager in the early days of punk, I would sit by the radio with a pen & notepad and write down the names of singles I liked – singles which, by the way, you would never have heard if it wasn’t for Peel. Then on Saturdays, armed with my list, I’d trot off to the indie record shop and buy as many of those singles as I could afford.
Ah! Happy days!
Your last comment about the intros being a vital part of any Live at the BBC compilation is illustrated in the respective releases by The Beatles and The Stones.
With the former, the jingles and interplay with the DJs are largely intact and are pivotal to the material – no one comes out of it badly and it’s charming; with the latter, they’ve been excised out of all existence, presumably not adhering to the image the brand want to market, and it’s largely without charm.
Spot on, DD.
Where the Kinks 2 CD Expanded edition releases of Face to Face and Something Else add radio sessions from the mid-60s, they keep the intros intact and are all the more evocative and enjoyable for it.
The phrase “dulcet tones” could have been invented to describe Brian Matthew
The intros are there as the recordings were sourced from a weekly radio shows the BBC compiled for overseas affiliate stations, which went under the name Top Of The Pops. This series compiled the best of that week’s session recordings, with Brian Matthew providing the links.
Stations would receive these shows either on reel-to-reel tape or pressed onto LP, and were meant to be returned or destroyed after use. With the master tapes long since wiped due to Musicians Union policy, these releases are the only sources of these recordings. It also explains why songs are missing from some sessions, as not all would be compiled into that week’s selection.
There’s a comprehensive database of these shows here:
http://totp.torbenskott.dk/