John Peel is Dead

I just learned that John Peel died last month. I suppose it's an indication of how out of touch I am that I didn't know about it until now. But there you have it.

If you live outside the UK, you probably don't even know who Peely was. Simply put, he was probably the most influential non-musician in the not-insignificant British music scene of the latter half of the 20th century. He was one of the original DJs on BBC Radio One (when the offshore pirate radio stations were shut down and he went legit, back when I was still in diapers), and the last of them to leave the airwaves. He introduced British radio listeners to punk, to reggae, to hip-hop, and countless other kinds of music. He single-handedly launched the careers of dozens of musicians, from Bowie to the Sex Pistols to the Smiths.

I came to know John Peel during a brief residency in the UK, spending a term at the University of Aberdeen, back in the mid-1980s. American radio was already well on its way to becoming the corporate pablum it is today, but I'd experienced the thrill of doing college radio, which whetted my appetite for more cutting-edge music. Then I got to Britain, where this proper-sounding middle-aged bloke on the fucking Bee-Bee-Cee was playing stuff that no one in the States would even touch. I recorded stuff liberally from the John Peel show, and mailed cassettes to a co-conspirator at my home college to play for the colonials.

I lost touch with Peely when I returned to the States, but I brought with me several EPs recorded for his show, released in those days in a series called "The Peel Sessions". A few names from the sleeve: OMD, AC/DC, T-Rex, Jeff Beck, Joy Division, Billy Bragg, Teardrop Explodes, Cocteau Twins, Joan Armatrading, Xymox, Wire, The Specials, XTC, the Fall, Pink Floyd, Elvis Costello, Manfred Mann, the Cure, and We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It. The belt on my little-used turntable has turned brittle, and it broke apart when I tried it just now, so I had to spin the Undertones' disk (one of Peel's all-time favorite bands) by hand. Which seemed appropriate, somehow. John Peel loved music at its most raw and elemental, and "Listening In" at 15-60rpm was the kind of thing he would have played and played up on his show.

I don't want to count how many years its been since I've heard John Peel, and I'm saddened to think that I'll never again hear him live on the air. But I can still hear him in my head, plain and clear as if it were yesterday. I ran across a quote from him that I can easily mentally transcribe in his voice: "I've always imagined I'd die by driving into the back of a truck while trying to read the name on a cassette, and people would say, 'he would have wanted to go that way.' Well, I want them to know that I wouldn't."

He didn't, of course. It was a heart attack. But I do hope he had some good music on at the time.