John Peel: RIP - 1939-2004
By: Matt Tomiak
rockfeedback has the tragic duty of announcing that veteran BBC broadcaster John Peel passed away last night, due to a heart-attack while on a working holiday in Peru. He was 65 years old.
The shock news is of deep sadness to anyone that's ever placed importance in alternative music. The man and his influence have shaped anyone who's claimed to embrace real music over the past 40 years. Striving to find belief that this has happened to someone so full of vigour and passion for life and his love, it all feels so seemingly impossible.
RIP: John Peel.
This week's Basement Club and respective, fourth anniversary party will be dedicated in Peel's honour. For more on this, visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1. We send our sincerest condolences to John's family, friends, colleagues, and fans.
JOHN PEEL OBE
1939-1965
I have a picture of John Peel that was printed in a national newspaper a couple of years back, featuring the great man wearing a Hefner T-shirt (cheekily, one of my favourite bands from a few years back). I've still got it pinned to a wall: there was just something so brilliant, so unique about a guy old enough to be my granddad still actively supporting the kind of music I loved. Plus he lived in a small Suffolk town not far from me and thus I could boast to all the trendy London scenesters that my home county boasted probably the best private collection of rock records in the country.
As the obituaries, eulogies and memories pour in from all corners of the rock globe, no-one seems to be in any doubt that John Peel was a most distinctive personality. And can you name any one else within the media, past or present, who could so effortlessly straddle both the middle-aged Saturday morning Radio 4 with 'Home Truths' and simultaneously the coolest corners of the music-industry with his cutting-edge Radio 1 show?
And lest we forget, Peel was one of the latter stations' original presenters when it first aired way back in 1967... how many scenes, movements and crazes have passed since then, yet Peel's avuncular tones, consistently championing the best in new music,
remained a mainstay of the station's broadcasting output for nigh on four decades.
But any talk of 'cool' rarely seemed appropriate with Peel: such a breath of fresh air in an industry saturated with posers and fakes. Miss Black America would sit alongside The White Stripes in the lovingly compiled from his listener's votes, reflecting the anti-elitist nature of his programmes. And just think back to the TV coverage of the Glastonbury Festival in recent years, where John's legendary shorts, wry humour, and weary tolerance in the face of his younger co-presenters' crass buffoonery would all make their annual appearances. Without him, the world of music is truly a lesser place.
RIP John Peel - I feel sorry and woeful that I'll never get another chance to bump into you during half-time at Portman Road in order to discuss the merits of Hefner's second album 'The Fidelity Wars' with you.