In between doing far too many other things I’m making my way through reels of recordings from BBC radio in 1968, identifying and digitising everything (mostly session recordings), which will be passed back to artists and eventually the British Library sound archive. In between Denny Laine’s Electric String Band and torrents of indecipherable songs from Tyrannosaurus Rex that all sound the same , the odd quirky vignette from presenter John Peel has been preserved. Here are three of them, beginning with John’s hitherto undocumented fascination (and rightly so) with JRR Tolkien. Alas, Tolkien never did a peel session, but he did release a record of readings, from whence this except derives…
Vintage fun with John Peel
Here’s another, with poet Adrian Mitchell:
And here’s the third – some people stamping with bamboo:
Just in case you have any gaps, Colin.
I have these three:
1968-07-24, 1968-08-11, 1968-10-27.
I’ve also got an old Radio London “Perfumed Garden” from 1967-08-07.
Not sure how complete any of these are.
Oh, I’m sure there’ll be many gaps, Mike. It’s not a collection of whole shows. The reels are collections of session tracks plus a few LP and single tracks that caught the listener’s fancy at the time, mostly tightly edited with maybe just a word or two from Peel et al at start or end. So they are ‘best ofs’ created very close to the time of original broadcast.
This goody was on the same reel as the above three items: the Yardbirds’ final BBC session (three of the four numbers), including two that until relatively recently, when another decent off-air copy turned up (used on the excellent ‘Radio Tymes’ CD from the Top Sounds label), were holy grails for some people.
Amazing to hear and thanks for posting this Colin. Love that early version of ‘Dazed And Confused’ at the end – a portent of the shapes of things to come, indeed!
Have you come across the possibly mythical Peel bit where he says something like ‘why not go and say hello to a cloud’ or possibly ‘kiss a tree’, or something like that? Probably from Perfumed Garden.
I believe that is indeed a Perfumed Garden line, Jazzer. I wonder, though, if he actually did say it or it’s one of those ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ things…
Just looked at Mick Wall’s book and he mentions that Peel used to write for counter culture magazines such as Gandalf’s Garden and International Times. In one article he wrote : ‘Touch the bark of a thousand trees, shoeless…then go to the children’s playground in Kensington Gardens and stare at the elves in the trees there’.
Happy days!
Well, if the garden was Gandalf’s that would explain the elves being there. I wouldn’t trust those trees, though…
Somewhere in Blighty I have that very copy of Gandalf’s Garden. It is as you say. But we laughed at him even then.
I do enjoy his cameo appearances on the Bowie at the Beeb set. At one point he remarks admiringly on the size of DB’s trousers – probably the Cooling-Tower Specials he’s wearing on the back of Hunky Dory.
Peel fans note:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08h87zr