I’ve just started listening to Peel shows from April 1993 which soundtracked the rehearsals/performances of a production of the musical Guys and Dolls, which I appeared in in August 1993. The first shows I’ve been making selections from are from the week of April 5-9 1993 when Peel, for reasons no one has ever quite managed to rationalise, was parachuted in to provide a week’s holiday cover for Jakki Brambles, the host of Radio 1’s daytime lunchtime show. It will be a few years before I blog about those shows, so I would direct you to the John Peel wiki so that you can see exactly how The Fall and Madonna came to be on the same playlist. For some commentators, it was a glorious week of worlds-in-collision brilliance that let some light in on the otherwise moribund state of daytime music playlists. For others, notably David Cavanagh, it was a flawed idea due to Peel not recognising the different sensibilities of the daytime audience meaning that the music balance jarred against rather than complemented one another.
For all that Richard Evans played up the magnitude of it being 23 years since Peel broadcast in the daytime on Radio 1, a listen to tracks like Sugar by Manifesto, broadcast here 4 months before Peel’s daytime stint, shows that he should have been asked to do it much sooner and more often. With its chiming, jangling guitars and gently catchy melody, this is prime daytime radio standard material being delightful to listen to without insulting the listener’s intelligence. And Peel, if asked, could probably have come up with a playlist of similar material to last the whole week without anyone noticing the join. The measure of the man is that he could have been put into any show on the Radio 1 schedule, be it day or nighttime based and brought the musical goods regardless of format, which is something very few other Radio 1 disc jockeys could have carried off as seamlessly*. I suspect he would have been all at sea though with trying to manage phone-ins or run a game/quiz within a programme. But had he been paired up with Radio 1’s Greatest Ever covering disc jockey, Kevin Greening, a man to whom Scott Mills owes a considerable debt, then the John Peel Breakfast Show on Radio 1 may have been more than just a pipedream. And Sugar would have been a deserved Single of the Week on it.
Video courtesy of bertq98
* Reflecting on it, I think that this assertion doesn’t entirely hold water and that I may have been guilty of making the assumption that what most Radio 1 DJs, especially the daytime ones, played on their shows reflected the sum total of their musical knowledge/interests. Something that was in many cases categorically untrue i.e. Tony Blackburn or Mark Radcliffe as soul and folk music devotees respectively.
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