In a 1999 documentary to celebrate his 60th birthday, John Peel described the niche he had carved out for himself on British radio as allowing him to lead something of a dream life. However, anyone who had been listening to this edition of John Peel’s Music, broadcast six years earlier, would have heard him describe his everyday life in somewhat more lugubrious and narrow terms. He described his weekends as being spent trawling around record shops in Central London, a pinched and drawn figure, trying to find records featuring Popolipo on guitar. To demonstrate just what a waste this was, he played a fairly boring track by Zaiko Langa Langa Familia called Coeur Ouvert. Though, having found a record featuring Popolipo may well have contributed to the jolly mood which Peel confessed to feeling in by the end of the programme.
We can be fairly sure that whatever records Peel had picked up on his latest trip around the stores, the majority of them were probably vinyl and not CDs. He had intended to include on the programme a track by Lotion, but it wasn’t until he opened the CD case in the studio that he discovered he’d left the disc in a CD player somewhere. In his ever expanding list of reasons to dislike CDs, he could add the ease at which they could be forgotten about - They’re left in the dark, little blighters. I mean you never leave a vinyl record on a turntable, do you?
Peel may have ended the programme in a jolly mood, but he had started it irked by the template on his latest notepad, which had the legend, Nice day… emblazoned across the top of each page. Why do people do that? I’m tempted to stop this programme right now! Which would have been quite the tantrum, given that he’d only played one record at this point.
There was a demonstration of the bond he had with his audience, when in response to a letter from a listener called Sebastian telling him that he wouldn’t be able to hear the show for a while as he was about to spend four months out in San Francisco, Peel told Sebastian that if he could provide him with a forwarding address in San Francisco, he’d try to ensure that he would be able to hear the shows while he was away. At the time, Sebastian may well have chanced upon editions of Peel Out in the States, a series of half-hour shows Peel made which were distributed to college and commercial radio stations in the U.S. across the first half of 1993.
This programme featured a horrified Peel riff on the then growing craze of bungee jumping. Before listening to the clip again, after a gap of maybe 2 years since hearing the file of the show, I had wondered whether he had mentioned this due to watching Dave Allen discuss it on his show, broadcast three days earlier. “You’d certainly crap yourself on the way down, wouldn’t you? And then you’d pass that crap coming down, on the way back up!” But, the inspiration came from there being a number of monitors in the BFBS studio which were showing people bungee jumping: How people do that…I mean it’s all of my worst fears brought to life really…or near death. I wouldn’t even go up to the places they jump from, let alone jump off them. I mean, utterly terrifying, these people are nuts! I’ve seen people doing it at the Isle of Man TT Races and it wasn’t that high by the standards of these things…though it doesn’t make much difference whether you fall from 80 feet or 180 feet, you’re still going to be seriously damaged by the time you hit the ground.
The selections from this show were taken from a full 2 hour recording. There were three tracks I wanted to include but was unable to find:
Phantom Surfers - Big Screen Spectacular Tonight: Taken from their LP The Phantom Surfers Play The Music From The Big Screen Spectaculars. Listening back to it, this short, sharp blast of contemporary surf guitar may not have made the cut had it been available.
Dreams Made Flesh - Ripchord - Taken from a 7-inch single called Two Ton Overcoat. Described by Peel as Another one of those obscure American singles on an obscure American label from an obscure American town that I keep coming back to because it has a certain je ne sais quoi. For me, the certain something is the chorus in which the singer exhorts, Don’t make me breathe, in the style of Semisonic circa 1998, which might sound gruesome to you, but would possibly have yielded a crossover hit for Dreams Made Flesh had they held the track back for a couple of years.
Hardfloor - Acperience I - There are a lot of different mixes of this space-trance dance track out there for sharing, but not it seems the version played by Peel on this programme by Mixmaster Morris.
Two tracks that were slated for inclusion fell from favour:
The Bear Quartet - Hrnn Hrnn - I suspect that when I first heard Peel play this, I was still vibing off the brilliance of Headacher, but when it came to listening back to Hrnn Hrnn, all of Peel’s prejudices about the dullness of Swedish bands seemed to be borne out.
Superchunk - The Question is How Fast - Oh dear…yet again Superchunk find themselves on the shortlist for the metaphorical mixtape only to be rejected from it when it comes to the crunch. If they give a damn about it, they’re fully entitled to feel victimised by this and it may be simpler for everybody if I just decide to ignore Superchunk entirely, going forward, regardless of how good their music is. It could be awkward though given that Peel continued playing tracks by them up to the end of 1994.
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