Peel appeal

If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. In fact he died in Peru on 25 October 2004, while on a trip for the Telegraph’s travel pages. This is one of God’s many cruel tricks on His creation. As one grows older, time passes more quickly. Just when you want each day to last longer, it becomes shorter, until you feel that life is hurtling you towards your terrifying appointment with mortality with positively unseemly haste.

After his death I wrote a rather sour column on Peel, for in later years I had grown tired of his incessant search for the shock of the new and his apparent lack of critical judgment. If a song was obscure and more or less unbearable to listen to, then it was absolutely fine by Peel. What he wanted, he said, was ‘to hear something I haven’t heard before’. Admirable in its way, of course, but he often seemed to be embracing novelty for novelty’s sake, and quality control was thrown out of the window. ‘We don’t do mellow on this show,’ I once heard him announce in that ironic, mournful voice after a particularly unbearable flurry of industrial noise, but sometimes mellow is just what you need, particularly if you are driving down the M40 late at night after a bum Shakespeare production at Stratford.

But I think the main reason I went off Peel is that I felt betrayed by him. When I listened to him late at night at boarding school in the Sixties and early Seventies, smoking cigarettes and drinking tepid coffee from a Thermos in my study, Peel seemed like a delightful older brother, full of wit and wisdom, and embracing the laid-back, peace and love attitudes of the times with what seemed like sincere relish. So how then could he become such an enthusiast for punk, which wanted above all to kill old hippies and consign the psychedelia and prog-rock that he had once played with such enthusiasm and affection to the dustbin of history? Even artists complained of Peel’s ruthlessness. He’d champion them while they were obscure. As soon as they made it into the charts he’d drop them, as if popularity might somehow compromise his cool outsider status.

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