To celebrate Peelie's 40th Birthday in 1979, NME put him on the cover. They also printed a list of his 40 favorite tunes of all time, as played on his show the previous week. You can listen to John Peel's 40-at-40 faves here.
What struck me about this list is the extent to which Peel's erased the music of the late 60s and the first half of the '70s. All the stuff on which he'd built his reputation - as broadcasting custodian of Underground Rock - via his shows Perfumed Garden and Top Gear. The music on behalf of which he started his own record label, Dandelion.
Almost the entire list consists of
1/ early rock 'n' roll and blues
2/ punk and New Wave (three Undertones tunes in the Top 5! The godawful Quads)
3/ reggae and soul
Okay, okay, there are two songs from the Dandelion catalogue, by Mike Hart and Medicine Head. And he does have a bona fide "heads" classic from Captain Beefheart. There's a Faces tune and a Neil Young song.
Still only 5 out of 40 to represent the whole 1966-1976 era - that's a bit of personal history revisionism there.
Still, could have been worse - could have been Peel listing his 40 fave schoolgirls, eh?
Instructive to compare this All Time Faves list with where Peelie's head was at in Christmas 1975 when he looked back at the year's offerings. This is his Top 15, counting down to the #1 which is the Be Bop Deluxe tune
Peter Frampton - Show Me The Way (A and M)
Bob Marley and The Wailers - No Woman No Cry (Island)
Joan Armatrading - Dry Land (A and M)
John Lennon - Imagine (Apple)
Rod Stewart - Sailing (Warner Bros)
Roy Harper - When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease (Harvest)
Jack The Lad - Gentleman Soldier (Charisma)
Millie Jackson - Loving Arms (Polydor)
Be Bop Deluxe - Maid In Heaven (Harvest)
You can hear the countdown of tracks with Peel's comments here
Now you might think this is the absolute nadir of rock music and the kind of climate that necessitated punk and its historical revisions, but immediately after playing Lennon's "Imagine" (not even properly from '75, a rerelease!), Peel actually says: "despite what other people say, I think this has been a great year for records, 1975 - and I think from this point on, all of the singles that I've chosen would actually get into my all-time Top 50"
Unbelievably, the next one is
Well, he could have been correct in his prognosis about these glories getting into his all time Top 50, because the 1979 list is only a Top 40 - perhaps "Sailing", "When An Old Cricketer", "Gentleman Soldier", "Loving Arms" and "Made in Heaven" would have been tightly clustered in the 50 to 41 stretch. But I suspect not... I suspect they were all junked to make room for The Quads, Silicon Teens and SLF and more stuff like that.
He did apparently insist to his dying day that The Quads was one of his all-time favorite singles.
Here's his faves from the previous year, 1974
postscript 9/14/2023
Michaelangelo Matos directs me to the famous Peel show in December 1976 which inaugurates the big switcheroo
https://www.mixcloud.com/karleldridge5/john-peel-10th-december-1976-the-famous-punk-rock-special/
And also points me to David Cavanagh's book Good Night and Good Riddance, "his history of John Peel on the radio through over 200 programs", which has good stuff on the Old Wave / New Wave transformation - MM helpfully directs readers to specific pages, suggesting starting "at p. 126 (Nuggets), jump to 188 (Ramones), then go from there"
I have the book and have dipped in here and there, but never read the stuff on the cusp-of-punk
It's a great concept for a book.
In fact, it struck me as a template that any number of writers could do and you would end up with a largely different book each time. You could pick different shows than Cavanagh. Or you could pick some of the same shows he picked, but just focus on different records and artists. You could connect the shows to different things going on in the wider music culture / society / politics.
I even toyed with doing it as a blog series, and started gathering Peel shows. Not only did I not do the blog series, I have never listened to the Peel shows!
One frustrating thing - something that frustrated Cavanagh -is that the number of shows from the prepunk'70s that have survived through fan archiving is very spotty. For some reasons there's more from the late 60s, the Perfumed Garden, and early Top Gear - perhaps it was more of a big deal, or that was the only way to hear the music, so people got their reel-to-reel tape recorders out. But some particular years in the early-mid '70s, there's only a handful of shows. Perhaps because Peel-type music you could get more easily from records shops... and it was prior to the cassette recorder becoming an integral part of music centers and transistor radio sets.
Cavanagh, conscientious researcher that he was (RIP, BTW), actually journeyed out to some national library building on the periphery of London and went through the records of each show, in which Peel listed what had been played on forms, so that performing rights payments could be directed to the right parties. I believe a few of shows he writes about are ones where these documents are the only archival residue - he wasn't able to hear the show or Peel's patter between records.
The prepunk '70s would be the ones I'd be most interested to hear. Because I didn't live through that era as a music fan - and the Old Wave gestalt is so fascinating.
Whereas with postpunk, I was a regular and attentive Peel listener. Being of very limited funds, I'd taped tracks off it (although hardly ever sessions - back in the day I was never that excited by the whole Peel session thing. I'm now a little more interested, just because of things like the first Scritti session which contained tracks that would never be released or properly recorded. But back then, no... when he'd played a track from a session that was like an interruption in the flow of actual records as far as I was concerned.)
Since Cavanagh did the book, some more Peel shows from the first half of the '70s have subsequently emerged. Often mutilated portions of a show, or of poor sound quality.
But it's still very spotty.
But yeah I never did it.
The whole later part of DC's project would not be tempting at all... meaning the last 25 years or so of his broadcasting.
You see, my real-time impression of Peel's show is that they got less enjoyable, essential or even useful in the post-postpunk era.
New Pop he gave a wide berth to (except for his cherished Altered Images) because it was getting played by the day time deejays on Radio One, so that meant he'd be stuck with (or perhaps simply preferred) postpunk's runty afterbirth, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, or actual punk records, from the Second Wave of Punk (I seem to remember a lot of Vice Squad). And there'd be roots reggae past its prime and the beginnings of his world-y interests.
From that era I seem to recall taping an early Triffids session, when they were Birthday Party / Doors influenced. But it was a slim pickings sort of time. .
Then as we get into the mid-Eighties, the Peel Show became an increasingly dreary listen... He did like the shambling bands, but which I mean the bogsheddy types, the rumbledythump bands as one fanzine tagged them, quite accurately.
My memory is that from 1986 onwards I rarely listened to Peel - partly because the show had got too eclectically disparate. But mainly - I just didn't need it anymore. As a music journo, I was getting sent so many of the new records, so I was able to be my own filter (Peel as filter seemed less and less reliable). And most evenings, I just wasn't in - I was out seeing bands, seeing people, enjoying the other things London had to offer.
As a journalist prone to excitation, I increasingly found Peel's gruff stolidity to be frustrating, deflating - the chronic understatement of the patter seemed to have this levelling effect.
So I think I might have listened to Peel once in the entire 1990s. And then it was because it was playing in a car I was in. I seem to remember him playing quite an exciting techno record, a real juggernaut of a track. But you wouldn't habitually turn to Peel for guidance on that kind of music, would you? Touching that he would continue to keep an interest (and later play his son's happy hardcore tunes), but yeah... there were other more reliable sources.
