John Peel: the DJ who broadened IN FOCUS the horizons of generations of listeners
Tony Blackburn might have embodied the cheery, cheesy style of the BBC’s new pop station during the day. But the DJ who did most to establish its reputation for showcasing the esoteric outer reaches of contemporary music at night was John Peel.
He made his debut on Sunday
1 October 1967 co-presenting the freewheeling, three-hour long, rock-focused radio programme Top Gear. Within months, he was a regular on Night Ride. And in the years ahead he would host, among others, Sounds of the Seventies, In Concert, and the eponymous, seemingly everlasting John Peel Show.
The Radio Times billed him rather blandly as the man who would play “the coolest sounds around”. But Peel did more than that. Having spent his young adult life drifting through dead-end jobs in the United States, browsing the record stores and doing late-night shifts on any radio station that would take him, he had accumulated a vast knowledge of the prog rock, R&B and blues scenes.
His tastes were ever-curious and largely unpredictable. For the show he presented on the pirate station Radio London, he dropped the adverts and weather reports to make way for more of the music that had taken his fancy. It was this languid, hippyish style and uncompromising approach that had convinced Radio 1’s controller that he would attract a huge cult following on the BBC.
Once installed, Peel stuck to his belief that it was his civic duty to introduce listeners to music they had little chance of hearing anywhere else on Britain’s airwaves. And although it was hard to imagine the corporation’s founding father ever tuning in, these late-night shows were entirely in line with John Reith’s own enduring philosophy: that, in making the strange familiar, the BBC could shape public taste, rather than merely reflecting it. As John Peel put it in his own inimitable way: “The programmes with which I’m involved are aimed at turning y’all on to some musicks that you might not otherwise investigate.”
Peel’s languid, hippyish style convinced Radio 1’s controller that he would attract a huge following