Peel 2

My friend Hugh just texted me. “My youth ends here.”

Certainly without John Peel, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. I just wouldn't have been interested in making my own music, at all, and probably wouldn't be writing.

I started listening to him in 1986. I was too young to go to gigs, and cooped up in the cultural wilderness that was and is South West Bedfordshire his show was the only way to hear the bands I wanted to hear. Because of him, I started doing my fanzine, I started corresponding with bands the length of the country, and eventually started writing my own music. I joined the Keatons in 1989, and about 2 weeks later he played our first single “Recidivistish”. We couldn't believe it. We ran to a callbox and invited him out for a curry. He replied “Unfortunately, I'm g- No! not unfortunately, at all! But I'm going home to see The Pig,” in that oddly affectionate way he referred to his wife Sheila. The Keatons went for a curry anyway.

In 1992 I was in a band called Gag. He gave us a session after playing tracks from our debut EP 3 or 4 times. We were cock-a-hoop. We couldn't believe it. We got to go to Maida Vale, record our rubbish music all day, and get paid 400-odd quid for the privilege. It was one of the most exciting days of my life.

No other DJ was as consistently dry and funny. I'm hoping we get to see his legendary Top Of The Pops links again; after George Michael and Aretha Franklin had just performed “I Knew You Were Waiting For Me” he turned to the camera and said: “It has been said that Aretha Franklin can make any old rubbish sound good, and there, she just has.” or maybe the best: “Just when you though music was getting dull and uninteresting: Here's Bon Jovi!”

Not always laughs, though. I heard him break down on air after the Hillsborough tragedy… He played Aretha Franklin's version of “You'll Never Walk Alone”, and tried to do the link but just started crying instead. So did I. It's the most moving bit of radio I've ever heard.

While I was doing my fanzine I sent it off to him, and he wrote back to ask me to come on as a guest on his show on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, which was broadcast throughout East Anglia on Sunday evenings. My dad drove me up there. I was 16 and terrified of meeting him (Peel, not my dad), but he was reassuring, funny, and above all a terrible interviewer. I was a terrible interviewee. Between us we created 15 minutes of abysmal radio, and when he put the next record on he laughed about it. “I'm even worse than John Walters,” he said. I still have the cassette. It's unbearable listening, but I might put it on this evening.