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Since Past Daily has a pretty sizeable overseas audience (UK in particular), you already know and have probably heard every word John Peel has spoken and every session John Peel ran during his career at the BBC.
But sadly, most Americans don’t – not all – but enough to make this post something new and potentially very interesting.
Safe to say John Peel was probably one of the most popular (and certainly most influential) disc jockeys broadcasting in Britain from the mid-1960s all the way his sudden death in 2004. He did probably more to break new bands and artists via his sessions than anyone else at the time. He was someone you listened to in order to find out about new music – and he had the crucial ingredient; an open mind. Subsequently, his musical choices ran the gamut and probably most closely resemble what was going on in the underground FM scene in America starting around 1968 – before the days of tightly structured playlists and focus groups and the largely anonymous approach to new music most commercial (and many public) radio stations adhered to.
Peel established a free approach to the enjoyment of music and his was an assumption that you, as the audience, were up for adventures – and whether you agreed with John Ravenscroft’s (aka John Peel’s) choices or not, you were given the opportunity to make up your own mind just as long as you were willing to take a listen.
Many of his broadcasts have survived, in fact a cottage industry of sorts has sprung up around the world, with collectors and enthusiasts coming out of the woodwork to share their gems with each other. The BBC, for the most part, was rather terrible about preserving much of that material (although a goodly amount more has been preserved by them than by their American counterparts) and so it was up to the collectors to come forth with complete shows, tracing back to almost the beginning of Peel’s career.
Admittedly, much of the material is in bad shape – most enthusiasts were kids at the time, no doubt with their very first reel to reel tape recorders, so anything resembling high quality is rare. But at least it’s around and it’s been preserved.
This broadcast of Top Gear falls somewhere in the middle – it sounds like it was recorded off a cheap transistor radio at a ridiculously slow speed in order to jam a whole 2 hour show without breaks on one side of a reel of tape. It was recorded live on April 27, 1969 and is typical of the Top Gear shows (and all the others Peel was at the helm for) – wildly eclectic – with sessions sprinkled throughout the two hours and more than enough unfamiliar music to make American collectors sit up and take notice of what might be out there.
At any rate, it’s a sample of what John Peel was up to during these formative years and is an excellent example of why John Peel was so popular and so influential among bands and artists of the period.
The tradition of live bands in-session is still very much what the present day BBC has been known for and is still alive, well and exposing new talent daily.
But for a reminder of the guy who pretty much started it – here’s an hour’s worth of John Peel and his Top Gear show from April 27, 1969.
