John was born in Heswall near Chester and after completing his military service in Britain in 1962, went to Texas and began working for WRR radio in Dallas. At this time The Beatles success was reaching its peak and John with his Liverpool connections found it helped his ratings to claim acquaintance with the group. He was in Dallas when John F Kennedy was shot and was at the press conference just before Lee Harvey Oswald was shot.
For the next three years he moved to various radio stations in America, among them KOMA in Oklahoma City and KMEN outside Los Angeles. He returned to Britain in 1967 and joined Radio London with the celebrated show The Perfumed Garden.
John was with Radio 1 from the beginning in 1967, establishing himself with the late night programme Top Gear. John was the first DJ to give exposure to punk, reggae and hip-hop, long before they crossed over into the mainstream. Almost anyone who is anyone in the world of music has recorded a session for Peel.
Apart from regularly topping music paper Best DJ polls, John won the 1993 Sony Award for Broadcaster of the Year and in 1994 was named Godlike Genius by the NME. He also presented Home Truths for Radio 4.
John recently celebrated 40 years on the air and was always seeking out the best new music around.
He died on the 26th October 2004 at the age of 65, after a heart attack while on holiday in Peru.
md, Mar 01, 2005
At the time of writing this comment, there is only one release in discogs on John Peel's page. John Peel was not a producer, not a DJ in the modern sense of the term. This goes no way at all to giving an indication of just how important Peel was to music during his long career. Search under releases containing the word "Peel" and you might come across a tiny fraction of the music that he helped introduce to the world...
I'd never cared about a "celebrity" dying until I heard the news of John Peel’s death in October 2004. Peel had a very direct influence on me in the very late 80s and early 90s. One of my all time biggest influences and favourite artists, Godflesh, I heard first in their Peel Session broadcast on his show.
Seeing and hearing him DJ at Sonar 2003 in Barcelona was one of the highlights of the festival. It says a lot about him that at the end of a party that had featured sets by Laurent Garnier, Jeff Mills, Francois Kevorkian, DJ Krush, John Peel and others I've since forgotten, the clamours at the end from the crowd were all for John Peel.
As rarely as it happened, there was nothing quite like clicking on the radio and hearing some bizarre music, wondering "what the hell is this", only to hear his voice come in at the end telling us "well, that was a lovely ditty from Disembowled Zombie" or something like that.
Even though I never met the guy, and in fact hardly caught the show in it's last 10 years, the familiarity of his voice and the influence he had on me musically really made him into someone I thought would always be around.
Reading some of the news reports the morning after his death, even those on the BBC, his home of so many years, just goes to show how completely out of touch people in the media really are about modern music and the myriad of genres he championed...from gabber to Afropop via Mongolian goat bothering anthems. The tributes given by his listeners seem far more appropriate.
Shortly after hearing the news of his death I spoke to my dad on the phone. He described his own experiences of "lying in bed late at night with a little Japanese transistor radio under the pillow, listening to Peel". This was in the 60s...years before I was even born.
Peel was the first person who had me staying up late into the night for the purposes of hearing good music. When his show moved to the late night weekend slot in the early days of the 1990s, I'd stay up until 90 mins before the end, then leave a tape recording the rest of the show.
John Peel even played one of my tracks on his show once in early 2002. I didn't get to hear it unfortunately, but just knowing it happened was and is amazing to me. Hearing his voice introduce it would probably have made me swoon.
Apparently he died in Peru fulfilling a lifetime ambition to visit the place. Cool.
