real radio

Rip It Up, Issue 80, 1 March 1984, Page 10

real radio

Richard Langston

John Peel is an oddity. In a sphere where style, pretension and hype areflH prevalent he wears his ill-fitting jeans as readily as his unaffectedness and goodhumour. Earthy. Not Carnaby St. "I'm not a hip bloke. Haven't got the. figure for it. I'm a 44-year-old father who is two stone overweight and balding. If you are going to be hip you really need to go back and be rebuilt."

He remembers rushing out and buying a pair of drainpipe pants and luminous. green socks after hearing Little Richard for the first time. But he never wore them. Having them in the wardrobe was enough. "A lot of people look at me and say, 'look at the poor old dear, he's 44' but I:was lucky to be born when I was. My whole life was transformed by the sudden and unexpected arrival of rock 'n' roll. The first time I. heard Little Richard and Elvis Presley it was like nothing Before,. it just hit you. Wham! This is what I have been waiting for! Life was never quite the same.'' _

Peel is no product, more a music fan whose obsession carried him on to the radio. There is a deliberately amateurish feel to his two-hour nightly BBC programme (whoops... I'll learn to use this fader yet) and the clubbishness of a university station.

Listeners are as possessive and cultish about his programme as the bands he plays. For the last nine years he has been voted Britain's top disc jockey by readers of JV/VIE and certainly he is pop's essential man behind the microphone.

He beachcombs the breaking wave of pop, exposing bands to keep the form constantly on the move. Bands from all around the world send him vinyl and demos. We owe more than a passing debt to him that punk exploded as big as it did.

Where he breaks possfbly the most ground is in the sessions he has recorded especially &or “his programme, the bulk of them youjjg unknowns plucked from the plethora of demos he receives daily (between 15 and 30) or maybe spotted in a club. He has a record collection stretching back beyond Noah (with a wealth of anecdotes to match) and his show is further enriched with old soul, blues and rock n' roll numbers.

At an age when his peers are content listening to their old Rolling Stones' albums, Peel is still in search of another slab of vinyl to challenge, exhilarate.

"I always relate everything to football when I explain this. 1 am more concerned with what Liverpool do this Saturday than what they did in their last match and in the same way I am only interested in the records 1 am going to play tonight or have in the boot of the car.

"Obviously there will cornea time when I don't feel like that and 1 will just want to sit back and listen to my old Fall albums but it hasn't come to that yet. It is not something that is deliberate. It is just a quirk in my nature.

"1 think how sad it must be to get locked in a certain time. Quite often.people, come up to

me and say, I used to love your programme back in 1974 but 1 can't listen to it now!' What a shame, I always wonder if they still eat the same food, read the same books and watch the same television as they did then.''

When punk first hit his airwaves regular listeners defected in the droves.

"A lot wrote in saying don't play any more of this stuff it is awful and disgraceful. I enjoyed the music in a rather fearful way. It was just

such strong'medicine you were rather frightened by it ... it was like a snake wriggling out of its tired old skin, it just blew everything away and made it seem redundant. "1 was rather tentative about it but the letters kept pouring in and I was rather excited by this reaction and I knew there must be something here. It was mainly the first Ramones' album and the Damned single.

"The audience dropped heavily but then built back up beyond previous levels and the average age of the listeners had completely changed, from 24 to 16.

"I hate to look back on punk as some golden age but the fact remains there were fewer records coming out and a much higher percentage of them were worth listening to. Out of 10 records four or five of them were wonderful and you couldn't wait to get on to the radio and play them. But now you have to look a lot deeper, dig a lot harder. It is still there but this is part of the'whole process of the evolution of popular music where there are periods of things being rather pompous and flatulent which it certainly is at the moment. The new Simple Minds' album is desperately dull and I like the band y'know. 1 would actually like to be able to find something I like because Jim Kerr is a football fan and when the band warmed up at a festival in Holland a couple of years back they played me

and me wife at football. My wife is very hard on the tackle and she goes in with every expectation of leaving the bugger crippled but I was really impressed the way Jim Kerr rode her tackles.

"You get Siouxsie and ' the • Banshees .doing fa' oub I e live album at the Royal Albert Hall and the Clash have turned into just another stadium rock band and you think 'this is not right! The bad old days, 75 all - over again'. In the ! end things f always go iso • terribly wrong.'' He doesn't remember the early and middle 70s ri being desperately dull at the time. "There were people like Pink Floyd, Captain peef hearth Led Zeppelin, T. ’ Rex and Frank [Zappa who were doing things that were interesting for the time but a lot of. the records]] I thought sounded wonderful, now sound terrible and that is the way it .should ; be. The records I like now I am probably going to say in 10 years time, 'Jeez, how co ula 1I } have ' ever liked that'. At feast I j hope ITd o f anyway. "Obviously there is always stuff that sounds great like the great individual voices of say Gene ' Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Captain; Beef heart;. Kevin Coyne, Neil Young, Feargal Sharkey, Robert Wyatt ... Little Feat sounded.wonderful back then and they still do and 1 still! like those early Ry.Gooder albums." Peel lives in a village of 450 people. 100 miles north of London and such is his distaste for the capital he spends as little time as possible.there. He eschews the bar and cocktail trail and avoids spending his time shaking the hands of pop stars.'. , • .'

"I always think it is a mistake to meet your heroes. - You ’meet people • whose music you despise and they turn out to be really nice and the people whose music you like turn out to be wankers. I only met Mark Smith (of.the Fall) recently. His wife came over to me and thanked me for what I had done for the band. She said Mark would have come over but he is not that type of bloke and fair. enough; I find the whole idea,of someone like him coming across to me quite tasteless. I met Joe St rummer and 'he turned out to be a real tosser and one of the Sex Pistols threatened me with violence. Paul Weller and I were once on a programme and when reviewing a Style Council single commented that Weller didn't seem to have much of a sense of humour. Afterwards he came across and said ere, what's this then Mr Peel think you know more about Mr Weller than me?' which just seemed to prove .my point." He does, however, admit to asking the BBC if he could bring his four children (all are named after, Liverpool football ’stars) along to the studios when star striker-Kenny Dalglish was* paying them a visit. The ; family i cottage ;is; awash in records and tapes and before he gets his children breakfast he puts a record on his old mono player. (The way they are heard on radio,.)

Among his five favourite singles of last year was a reggae tune 'Picture on My Wall' by the Naturalites. The others were: 'This Charming

Man, by The Smiths; 'Blue Monday' by New Order; 'My Mother the War' by 10,000 Maniacs and Peppermint Pig' by the Cocteau Twins. Reggae is what he chooses when he is simply listening for pleasure. "I know only twerps tell you they have a favourite record of all time but mine is Misty in Roots Live in Brussels a couple of years ago. I] know it sounds faintly ludicrous, me being white and middle class but every time 1 hear it I am reduced to tears."

During the drive down to London he might put a demo tape on the car stereo. "Demos come in at a terrifying rate. It is not physically possible to listen to them all and this is something what bothers me because people's lives are tied up in them.

"You go through a pile of them and there's one with an amusing name so you put it on and it's good so you book the band for a session and a record company hears them and life may never be the same again for them. So you are in a position ... people talk about the power you have on the radio but I have great misgivings about this. I don't think you are as influential as people like to make out, but at a personal level you do have the power to radically change someone's life and not always for the best. I always think of Malcolm Owen of the Ruts and obviously you can't let yourself dwell on these things but I always wonder if I hadn't played their first single which led to Virgin signing them if he would be alive today. "Going right back, everybody but the Rolling Stones and the Beatles did sessions for us. Obviously there are bands like Yes that you feel deeply embarrassed about. Coming more up to date Roxy Music and Supertramp did sessions before they were signed. Funnily enough the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were paralleled by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. Obviously Malcolm McLaren never agreed with this sort of thing because he saw it as being too conventional which is fair enough. We got the Clash as far as the studio but they were too drunk to play.

"There are also people who are never going to be big names that we have stuck with because the stuff they do is so strong, like Captain Beefheart, the Fall, the Nightingales, the Cravats. These people are not going to be played a lot elsewhere." He did actually start up his own record label, Dandylion, in the late 60s and early 70s, but it

was a financial catastrophy although artistically he believes it produced some interesting stuff

"If I had bags of money I would do it again and record bands with funny names. I quite like the idea of recording bands for other than the traditional' reasons of them being good or making money." Peel is an unconventional character, in many ways he believes he had ; a period of insanity in his late twenties when, living like a hermit in a hut at the bottom of someone's garden, he starting spinning a giant spiders web - and he 1 certainly,doesn't share the superciliousness or xenophobia of his countrymen. "I enjoy playing foreign music. It is good what is happening in Australia, the Birthday Party became quite a favourite at one time. Someone sent me a record from New Zealand a couple of years back and I really liked it and played it a couple of times on the programme but for the life of me 1 can't remember their names."

Peel got his start in radio in Dallas, Texas, after fleeing his native Liverpool over the prospect of a horrendous 21st birthday party. "It was going to be the marquee on the lawn, you know that type of thing. I'm not the partying type. I am always the bloke on the stairs with his head in his hands."

Initially he was invited to talk about some records he had on the Bluebird label, which represented the period where blues was going from one person strumming a guitar to small acoustic bands.

His big break came with the arrival of the Beatles.

"Dallas adopted me as their surrogate Beatle. It was crazy I was mobbed downtown, I couldn't go anywhere without girls chasing me. I know it sounds like some masturbation fantasy but it was one of the most wonderful periods of my life." He eventually joined the BBC in 1967.

As unthinkable as it may seem his show has been threatened with the axe but for the present his critics have been beaten off (he has just signed a new contract). This being 1984, the BBC would prefer to lull us to sleep with sweet music.

"They have never been very happy with the programme to the point where they disapprove of some of the people they imagine might be listening, you know because I play requests for people in prison and they don't like that." But he does pay a begrudging compliment to his bosses: "I don't think it would be possible to do a programme like I do any other place on earth." A wonderful oddity.