Chance Meeting
Friday August 30th, 2024 with Heavy Ben
John Peel Sessions

Chance meeting on a teenage dream of a record box and a live transmission BBC 1 Radio host John Peel was born today, August 30, in 1939. He played unheard, unpolished music to the British public for an astonishing 37 years. At his thatched cottage home north of London, Peel reinforced the walls to hold 26,789 LPs. A shed in the backyard held his 45s, another one his 7”s. Bids for the collection have reached £1 million, and the British Library is interested. Since the BBC hired him away from London Pirate Radio, Peel logged 15,000 hours of air time and recorded 4,000 sessions. In his last years at BBC, by which time the internet had greatly expanded his audience, Peel received roughly 200 demos a week. He spent six to eight hours a day listening to records. Peel's enthusiasm for music outside the mainstream occasionally brought him into conflict with the Radio 1 hierarchy. On one occasion, the station controller Derek Chinnery contacted John Walters and asked him to confirm that the show was not playing any punk, which he (Chinnery) had read about in the press and of which he disapproved. Chinnery was evidently somewhat surprised by Walters' reply that in recent weeks they had been playing little else. In a 1990 interview, Peel recalled his 1976 discovery of the first album by New York punk band the Ramones as a seminal event: "At that time almost all the new bands comprised of people who had previously been in successful bands who had broken up then reformed.... Well I played the first Ramones LP – it was identical to the first time I had heard Little Richard – the intensity was frightening! So I played five or six tracks on the next show and immediately I received mail from people demanding that I never play stuff like that again. Whenever that happens I always go in the opposite direction, so I played more and it was great! It was a classic case of changing courses in mid-stream and in a month the average age of the audience dropped by 10 years and the whole social class changed – which I was very pleased about." In 1979, Peel stated: "They leave you to get on with it. I'm paid money by the BBC not to go off and work for a commercial radio station ... I wouldn't want to go to one anyway, because they wouldn't let me do what the BBC let me do." John Peel Wiki https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/John_Peel_Wiki List of Peel Sessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_Sessions John Peel – A Frankly Monstrous FM Legacy https://www.citr.ca/discorder/november-2005/john-peel-a-frankly-monstrous-fm-legacy/ (to embiggen the show icon, right-click and choose "Open image in new tab") -- note the CKCU banner in the top-right image!