PEEL SESSIONS. Everybody's heard of them, right? If you're a fan of rock & roll or a record collector, chances are good you own at least one, since there have been few rock artists of any significance over the past 30 years who've passed up the chance to record them.

Despite their fame, it often comes as a surprise how few aficionados in North America are aware what the "Peel" in these sessions actually represents. I've heard acquaintances and people in record stores tell me they thought Peel was a town or a street, a studio or a club. I've even seen it in print.

Sorry kids, it's none of them.

In actuality, "Peel" is the legendary British disc jockey John Peel who's been the instrumental force behind the live recordings since 1967.

Peel is also regarded by many fans as "The World's Greatest DJ." If the boast isn't exactly quantifiable, I should mention up front that he's certainly my favourite. Although I haven't heard his main contribution to radio -- as host of his own program on BBC Radio 1 since the inception of that FM rock network in the late 1960s -- I've been a regular listener to his weekly half-hour BBC World Service program since I was an early teenager.

My interest has intensified the past few years. Call it a fix. True, it's only a half-hour per week and seems to end before it starts, but it's 26 hours of music a year that I'd otherwise probably never hear.

His legend precedes him of course, but it's not simply what he's done in the past that makes his program a "can't miss" proposition each week. It's the incredible diversity of contemporary music he plays, music that nobody else in the mass media touches. Some of the material might be found on a rare low-power college station somewhere, but good luck trying to find it. As for mainstream commercial rock radio stations, forget it. Dancing to the beat of his own rhythm, Peel has superb instincts and tastes, is an excellent compositor, and has long been vital to introducing an incredibly diverse variety of music -- punk rock, reggae, hip hop, techno, and much more -- to a loyal audience and helping foment broader and widespread acceptance for the music.

As far as his radio instincts are concerned, Peel is the model of brevity and modesty. Music is introduced with minimal fuss, bereft of rock-jock bombast or the I'm-hip and cooler-than-you'll-ever-be attitudes of DJs all too familiar to North American rock radio listeners.

What I like best about Peel is the genuine passion and enthusiasm he projectes for the adventure and excitement of rock music, without ever trying to upstage it. Underlying his passion is a respect and understated sense of history. He grew up a fan since the art form's infancy, and continues to have his passion re-ignited daily. His is a love affair with new music that's inexhaustible and readily obvious to anybody that listens. He's also got style. As rare as one ever gets the chance to hear the music he plays, rarer still is his touch to incorporate the most divergent of musical forms with seamless and uncanny transitions. On paper it shouldn't work, but he makes radio swing. For a window into his oeuvre, his World Service show the week of my interview comprised The Candy Skins, Panel Donor, Tekniq, Bennett, Vinyl, Billy Bragg (the only familiar name), and Creeper, carried so easily through so many extremes that it sounds effortless.

As a longtime fan of Peel and his contribution toward much of the music I love, I'd wanted to interview him for a while, since information on this side of the pond about his career is virtually non-existent. So, I knocked off a letter with a begging request, and he was kind enough to respond with a postcard, phone number and invitation to call. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity.

I spoke to John by phone at his home east of London in late June [June 26, 1996]. A 90-minute window of opportunity came on a Sunday afternoon betwixt the semi-finals of soccers European Championship. Peel was only too happy to divert himself from his nail-biting anticipation awaiting his beloved England taking on arch-rival Germany immediately following our chat. (Unfortunately for John, England would go down in a deflating penalty shoot-out).

DF: You're English, but I was surprised to learn that you actually began your career as a disc-jockey in the United States.

JOHN PEEL: That's right, in Dallas, Texas.

How did you get your start?

Golly, it goes right back I suppose to when I was a kid and used to listen to the Armed Forces Radio Network and Radio Luxembourg, and I'd think what a good job to play records that you really liked on the radio. After I finished school and hadn't really passed my exams to get the kind of job I wanted -- as a matter of fact, I didn't know what kind of job I wanted anyway, but I didn't have enough exams to go to university -- I did two years of military service. At the end of that my dad was asking, "What are you going to do when you finish?" I said, "Well, I'm just going to hang around for a while?" [laughs] -- and he said, "I'll send you to the United States if you'll go." I thought that would put off the fatal hour of trying to find a job and also might give me the chance to get on the radio, so I went over there in the middle of 1960. The first radio programs I did were on a station called WRR in Dallas and they had a rhythm & blues program called Kats Karavan, spelled inevitably with two K's. I had some British LPs of blues and R'n'B stuff that were only available in Britain and Europe, and I went along and played them some of those records and they put me on the radio to talk about them. I thought they'd probably put me on there because of my extraordinary knowledge of the music, but in fact I think they probably put me on because they found my accent entertaining. In those days I used to talk like Prince Charles [laughs].

This was an evening shift?

It was, in fact, I think it was 10-to-midnight, as far as I can remember. I just did one night a week, Monday night's, a kind of half-a-program. It only lasted a few weeks and then I asked -- at least suggested -- that they started paying me, and they told me to bugger-off at that point.

How different was radio in the United States at that time from radio in the U.K.?

God, it couldn't have been more different! The radio in Britain at the time was very much like the BBC World Service now, not in the actual programming, but being very similar in the sense that no program was ever more than an hour long, and most were only half-an-hour. There was all kinds, like they'd still do programs live from a works canteen somewhere -- a program called Music While You Work -- and they'd have comedians and some orchestra playing live, or some dance band or whatever playing live, and they'd have a half-hour program of, y'know, theater organ music, then a news program, and then maybe a soap opera, so it was very varied. As far as programs devoted to rock music, well, there weren't any. The main programs you'd have to listen to were -- there was a program called Housewives Choice, which was a morning request program, and then on the weekends there was a thing called Family Favourites, which was done in conjunction with British Forces Radio. Half of it came from Cologne and half came from London, so you'd listen to those programs in the hopes of hearing a record that you liked. Most of the time it was kind of Glenn Miller records, or the Nuns Chorus from wherever it is the Nuns Chorus comes from, stuff like that. There weren't an awful lot of rock records played. I enjoyed listening to the radio anyway, but apart from the Armed Forces Network and Radio Luxembourg, there wasn't anything on domestic radio specifically aimed at people who ended up buying records.

The BBC had a monopoly on British airwaves at the time.

Yes, they did, yeah.

So I take it that most people heard stuff like Elvis from non-British radio?

That's right, but in fact I first heard Elvis on the Family Favourites program. I'd read about him in the music papers I used to read avidly and it sounded pretty interesting to me, and then, y'know, "And now for Lance Bombardier Higgins who's stationed at B-L-A-R 27, his wife's requested a record by Elvis Presley, here's "Heartbreak Hotel".". It's difficult to imagine now really, but it just changed your life in the space of a minute and forty-five seconds, and nothing was ever the same again.

You were in Dallas when President Kennedy was shot and attended a press conference featuring Lee Harvey Oswald.

Yes, that's right. This was not the day Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby; it was a few days before. Lee Harvey Oswald was presented to the press. He'd been arrested and charged. Earlier on when the assassination first happened, I was working for an insurance company on Central Expressway, so I was able to get into town pretty quickly. I was an office boy and could come-and-go as I pleased, so when the assassination was announced on the P.A. at the office, I just drove into town. I went to the police cordon and told the policeman, "I'm from The Liverpool Echo" and instead of telling me to piss-off, he let me through. It's one of those things that sounds so bizarre. I walked down, I didn't go to the grassy knoll, I just stood on the other side of the road and kind or watched what was going on until frankly it became boring. That's hard to imagine, but it did. After about 40 minutes watching people scurrying about, I then went and made what I'd said retrospectively true and phoned The Liverpool Echo to give them the story, but they weren't terribly interested. I thought, Christ, I've always wanted to get into journalism and here's my chance, I could be The Liverpool Echo's "Man in Dallas," but they didn't care. I was a bit wounded by that, but then that night a mate and I were driving around and there was nothing to do, so I figured we'd go down to police headquarters and see what's going on. We went down there and I asked the police officer what's happening. He said, "there's a press conference in a few minutes," pointing to a flight of steps at the edge of the building. So I said, "Actually, I'm from The Liverpool Echo and this is my photographer," and he let us in, we went down there. I mean, we didn't have a pen or paper or camera between us, but we went in there. It seems so unlikely. We were all standing in this room and they had the identification parade in the basement of this building and they said -- Henry Wade said -- that this is the man that's been charged in the assassination of President Kennedy, and they brought in Lee Harvey Oswald. He stood there looking kind of puzzled and alarmed for a while, and was taken away again. In one of the bits of film of that press conference they show Jack Ruby was in the room -- I had no idea about him at this time -- but in a documentary they showed on British television the camera pans across the room to show him, and in the last few frames me and my friend Bob are standing there looking like tourists.

I heard a new and unusual conspiracy theory that the Free Masons were responsible for the assassination. Do you have your own theory?

None at all, no. I wish, I don't know, y'know, I think, I mean, everybody else does, but I think we'll probably never know the truth.

You bounced around a few more radio stations in the States.

Right. I went to KLMA in Oklahoma City...

This was a Top 40 station?

Yeah, an American Top 40 station that wanted a British DJ. Back then, there was all sorts of Canadian DJs, many of them calling themselves James Bond. Almost every station had a Canadian who pretended to be called James Bond [laughs], because apparently to an American ear they can't tell the difference between an English accent and a Canadian accent. That seems extraordinary to me [chuckles], but this is what they used to claim. You'd be driving around in somewhere like Kansas and you'd switch on a local radio station and there'd be a guy on there going, "Hi there, I'm James Bond, I'm Ringo Starr's cousin!" Come on, do me a favour!! Anyway, I was at KLMA for a year, being their kind of British expert -- the British explosion was all the rage -- and man on the morning program, which was called The Paul and John Show. From Oklahoma City I moved to KMEN in San Bernadino in California and did more of the same for about 18 months.

You returned to Britain in the spring of 1967 to join the pirate station Radio London with a show called The Perfumed Garden.

Well, I returned to Britain and then joined Radio London, but I didn't return specifically to join them. In fact, I didn't have anything to do at all when I first came back, but with good fortune my mother lived next door to somebody who had connections with Radio London and asked me to come on down, even though they knew they didn't have very long to go because they were about to be closed-down by the government.

Radio London was an offshore pirate, right?

Yes, so we spent our time on a ship, two weeks on board, then a week on shore.

This was prior to the formation of BBC's Radio 1. I'm curious, when you returned from the United States, how had radio in the U.K. changed since you'd left?

Well, the domestic radio wasn't all that different, at least the legal radio wasn't. But the pirate stations like Radio London and Radio Caroline were totally different, they were modeled on what was going on in the States. The BBC obviously wasn't terribly adventurous, but then I don't think the pirates were terribly adventurous either. I mean, musically they were, but the attitude was pretty much the same. I would say that Radio London tended to be a little more adventurous than Caroline, because Caroline had a kind of pay-for-play system where the records that were played were paid for [laughs].

Payola...

Well, not really. I mean, there wasn't any secret about it, that was just the way the station operated. The whole operation was illegal, so how they were getting financed really didn't matter. They funded themselves by getting people to pay for the records.

I take it these pirates were quite popular in London?

Oh, incredibly popular, yes. They transformed radio. They made it necessary for the BBC to introduce Radio 1 as a replacement when they were closed down by the government's marine transit legislation at, I think, the end of August 1967. They had taken such a large percentage of the audience that the BBC was really obliged to introduce pop music stations. It was at that point they started Radio 1.

How did you immediately get started there?

Well, I just wrote a kind of greasy letter like you do in a job application, and after a lot of debate, got the position. There's an excellent book about the BBC, Radio 1 and the Sessions by a man named Ken Garner -- it's now out of print, but I suppose can be picked up in remainder bins somewhere -- which tells the story in wearisome detail, but I was given a six-week contract to start on September 1st, 1967 and they kept me on thereafter.

In 1976, some pirates pulled a prank during your show. Do you recall the circumstances of that?

I don't think I can actually, no. I've never heard of that.

[On April Fool's Day, 1976, a group of radio pirates/hackers on the Isle of Wight pulled a grand hoax over the BBC and audiences in London and southern England. The pirates overpowered the BBC's Wurridge relay transmitter by swamping the signal with their own broadcast from a mobile transmitter. Peel's show began and was shortly interrupted by Peel's signature tune with slide guitar, then promptly followed by machine-gun fire, The Who's "Substitute," and continued with fake programming for 35 minutes. BBC engineers resumed regular programming after a flood of listener complaints. The broadcast featured a radio address by the "new Chairman of the BBC" -- Idi Amin.]

You know, I've never heard that story [chuckles], but I suppose it's possible. That's weird.

You started at Radio 1 with a program called Top Gear.

They'd already had a program called Top Gear back in the early-1960s on what was then called the BBC Live program, and they had some music programs on that. They had a program called Saturday Night with people like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the early-to-mid-60s, and then when they started Radio 1 they revived the name of Top Gear. So it wasn't my idea, [laughs] but that's what they called it, yeah.

Were you obliged to follow a playlist in the earliest days of that?

No, well, not really. Initially, the programs were three hours long and they didn't believe one DJ could do a three-hour program by himself. You have to remember that these were the first unscripted programs ever broadcast by the BBC. They were terribly nervous about it. Even then you were obliged to have a complete rehearsal before the program, so you'd have to come in to the studio beforehand and run through the entire program as if it was live. It sounds incredible for a record program, but that's what you did nevertheless. In the days of things like the request programs for housewives that I mentioned earlier, they would be completely scripted, and the script would have to be approved. It was very, very tightly controlled at that point, so the program's producer and myself would get together. The idea for the show, the original brief for the program was something like, "The program that looks over the horizon," or, "Beyond the horizon of pop," or something. And of course, the BBC imagined, I suspect, that we'd be going to the London Palladium and interviewing Dusty Springfield about her forthcoming LP, stuff like that. There were six DJs employed to present this program in rotation, but the producer wanted me to do it and not the other five, so eventually I ended up doing it on my own. The producer and I used to meet every week and go through all the new records and decide which ones we wanted to play, and luckily his tastes pretty much coincided with mine. The thing was, though, that we were employed as presenters and not as programmers. Again, it sounds like something you make up for effect, but it was perceived as a disadvantage to have a presenter who was interested in music because he might be liable to being influenced [laughs]. So most of the people who were employed had no interest in the music at all. They just wanted to get on the BBC because it was a job by which you could procure a very enumerative living, you could get TV work, and if you became sufficiently famous you could get jobs opening department stores. I suppose there were times when Bernie Andrews -- that was the name of my producer -- imposed records on me that I wasn't terribly keen on, but there was also times when I imposed records on him that he didn't like. By and large, it was a mutual agreement between us.

This was originally a weekend show?

Yes, either Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

Did you hold down another job at the time?

No, that was about it. I used to go around sort of very much living the hippie lifestyle, because I really believed in it and didn't really need much money anyway. I had been married, but my wife had gone off with somebody else, so I was pretty much living on my own and didn't need a great deal of money. In fact, I used to give it away in a rather hippie-like fashion [laughs]. These people would turn up at the doorstep and tell me they'd written to John Lennon for £50,000 and to Donovan for an island off Scotland or something, but in the meantime could I lend them £25 to see them through the night, and I used to give anything I could afford. I used to do a bit of writing, but didn't get paid much for that, and I used to do gigs at universities and one or two other places playing records for a few hours. Sometimes I'd take a band along with me, usually Tyrannosaurus Rex [T-Rex].

The BBC management and culture back then sounds rigid and uptight, were they ever casting a suspicious eye toward you in regards to your hippie lifestyle?

I think they were just mystified by the whole business and mystified by me as much because we were all writing articles about the British class system and how it needed to be destroyed. I was a kind of a good middle-class boy and I'd been to an expensive private school, so they couldn't understand how someone with what was perceived as my advantage would want to be involved with these grubby hippies and terrible music. I think they were just puzzled by me more than anything, and they were puzzled by the content of the program. But to give them their due, after the initial birth pangs of the program nobody on the management side has ever interfered or attempted to interfere with the actual content of the program. It existed a bit in the first few years in conjunction with having a producer, but for the last 20 or 25 years the choice of music has been entirely mine. For a long time there was a strange system where in order to satisfy the BBC's rather arcane requirements, I had to make a list of all the records I wanted to play and the producer would build the program from that list, but the musical selection was all mine.

Most DJs on commercial radio in North America would find that independent control pretty enviable. They're typically restricted to a playlist.

Yes, the same sort of thing happens on commercial radio over here quite a lot, where, you know, a computer picks and constructs the program.

Or they employ research analysts and focus groups.

Yes, well, I couldn't cope with it myself, I have to admit. It seems to me to be the very opposite of what radio should be about. The reason I like radio is at least the possibility exists of spontaneous and genuine excitement. I always say, it remains true why I like a varied list of selections of records on my program, because I think you have to run the risk of delighting the audience. I remember hearing my first Delmore James track when I was driving through Louisiana in the middle of the night, and it was one of those things I shall never forget. Or my first Otis Redding record when I was driving back from having done a gig on what was then an Indian reservation in the south of Oklahoma. Both of those things I shall never forget and I think that's the great strength of radio. If you've got a rigid and conservative playlist, then the chances of that happening are pretty remote.

There must have been times when you've played records that have either horrified or alienated your audience.

There's always been some. When I played my first reggae records, for instance, a lot of hippies were outraged, because reggae at the time was the music of the skinheads, who were obviously the hippies kind of natural enemy. When I first started playing punk, like The Damned, there were people who'd been listening a long time and just wanted me to go on playing Grateful Dead records forever, they were pretty opposed. Same thing when I started playing rap and hip-hop when it first started coming out of New York, there was a lot of objection to that. But people kind of grow into it. It's always nice when you get letters saying, "I wrote you a letter a year ago telling you not to play any more of this stuff, but those were the last 4 or 5 records I bought."

That must be pretty gratifying?

It is, yes. At the moment there's a lot of people that don't like a lot of the dance stuff I play, but I keep sticking it in there until they get used to it.

As far as playing punk rock, didn't the BBC ban the Sex Pistols at the time?

Well, it was one of those strange BBC compromises. The records weren't banned, but you had to get permission to play them. The only one that was in-effect banned was "God Save the Queen." It seems like a ridiculous concept, it wasn't banned, but you had to get permission.

Did you play it?

Oh yes, yeah, but I wasn't given permission. It's really just a part of the BBC's system of checks and balances. You have to bear in mind that they're answerable to any member of the public, because it's publicly funded. They have to protect themselves. I think sometimes they've overdone it, but they have to protect themselves from any member of the public who complains, so the asking for permission was their defense mechanism. I think they have too many times tended to err on the side of caution. If you get a lot of letters saying, "Hey, I really like what you're doing," they don't pay any attention to those. But as soon as you get one written in green ink from some maniac who says you're Satan, they'll take that incredibly seriously [laughs]. "Thank you very much for your letter, but we've asked Mr. Peel and he assures us that he isn't Satan." It's a strange organization to work for, and it's changing a lot, but I rather like the BBC as a national institution, I must say.

Compared to the 1960s, and even now, you were incredibly busy during the 1970s, weren't you?

Yes, there was Top Gear, the World Service program, and then I got an extra program from midnight-to-one, where I used to have music and poetry and people coming in to talk. People like John and Yoko would come in and talk about codswallop, which I used to quite like doing. And then they changed everything to something called Sounds From the Seventies, which as the name implies ran through the 1970s. That was every night from ten-to-midnight, and I did two of those at first, and then after a period of time I did all five of them. My memories for dates is poor, it's just one of those things as you get older your brain cells die off and I can't be bothered to use the ones I've got left to remember dates, but I lost the Friday night show to a heavy metal program, so I was doing four shows a week for about a decade or more.

Your radio show seems at total odds with the television program Top of the Pops, but you were the host of that too. How did that come about?

It's one of those things, like playing punk and reggae, that I hate being told what to do, and in that sense people would say to me that Top of the Pops was, y'know, "Hey man, you've sold out." Well, you think, what does that mean? What does "selling-out" mean? First of all, you got paid peanuts for doing it, so if you're going to sell out, you might as well sell out for loads of money. So when people were telling me I shouldn't be doing Top of the Pops, I just thought, bugger it, I'll do it. The fellow I was doing it with was a Canadian named David Jensen -- "Kid" Jensen -- from Vancouver originally, I think. He used to be on the radio before me, we used to call ourselves "the rhythm pals" as a kind of joke, and we used to intervene in each other's programs -- not, I hope, in an obnoxious kind of HEY! disc jockey kind of way -- and we used to socialize a lot together. I think of all the people I've worked with at Radio 1, he was the one I got along with best, so I was very disappointed when he moved to a commercial station in London where he got, I think, about three times as much money [laughs], so I don't blame him for doing it. Anyhow, he and I did Top of the Pops for three or four years, something like that, not every week, we did it once every five-or-six weeks. This was at the end of the 70s and trickling on into the 80s. I remember we used to introduce people like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and WAH!

Did you enjoy doing television?

Not very much. As I say, I did it because I used to enjoy Kid's company, so when he stopped doing it, I sort of stopped doing it as well, I didn't enjoy it as much. I've always been crap at television. There's always been the assumption that if you're on the radio that you must also be good at television, which seems to me complete nonsense. I find radio is something I'm at ease with, whereas television I've always been uncomfortable with.

I heard that you left the show because it was embarrassing your children.

That was the main reason, yeah. Part of the reason as I said was because Kid wasn't doing it any more, but my children had reached the age where their mates were giving them a hard time. Obviously, when they were very young, they thought everybody's dad was on television -- you don't know when you're a small child -- so seeing daddy on television really didn't mean much to them. Then as they grew older and realized that everyone's dad wasn't on television, their mates would start saying they saw dad making a twerp of himself on television the other night [laughs] and it started to get sort of embarrassing. I used to get recognized in public, which the children didn't enjoy very much either. People would come up to me and ask, "Hey, are you who we think you are?" Well, you think, that's sort of an unanswerable question. Who do you think I am? The children just got embarrassed. We were at the stock car races just down the road from where we live, and we were sitting there and this fellow came over and said, "Are you the bloke on the TV?" And I thought, actually no, I'm not the bloke on television, I'm their dad, that's who I am. So at that point, I decided to stop doing it.

How did the Peel Sessions start?

They started right at the beginning of Radio 1. I can't think who did the very first one -- someone like Tim Rose and The Who, or The Move might have been the first, I honestly can't remember. When Radio 1 started, their arrangements had the most complex negotiations with the musicians union and performing rights people, and part of the agreement was that they were only allowed to use a certain amount of time that records could be played each day, and this was known as "needle-time." They were broadcasting from six in the morning until midnight then, and they were only allowed so many hours of needle-time a day, and it was rigorously counted, too. So for each program you had to account for every second of needle-time, and the performing rights people would employ people to check. If you were playing a record for the very first time, you were allowed to consider that "review-time." You were permitted review-time in addition to the needle-time, it was all the most arcane business, but most of the records we played were being played for the first time anyway, so we got away with a fairly light allocation of needle-time. But one of the things that had to be done was that a certain amount of live music had to be incorporated into the day's programming. This very rarely meant live, although it did sometimes. You'd get people coming in like the Northern Dance Orchestra, which was a big band of session musicians, and they would do cover versions, usually rather drab cover versions -- musically competent, but rather dull cover versions -- of hits of the day. I remember hearing them do a cover version of "Purple Haze" once, which is something I shall never forget as long as I live. With this Top Gear program, we were obliged to have live musicians on, so we thought we'd turn it to our advantage and start getting in people who might not have recorded before, or getting in different combinations of musicians. This was right from the very start of Radio 1. I suggested to the BBC in the early days that perhaps they could release some of the sessions on record, but they weren't even slightly interested [laughs]. They had a record company that was part of the BBC, but it was one of those strange 20s or 30s concepts where it was seen as rather vulgar to make money. They put out LPs with titles like, Great Wimbledon Champions of the 1932, stuff like that, utterly bizarre records that probably never sold, but are now probably quite collectible.

What's the procedure for recording the Sessions?

They're single-track live recordings. I'm not too familiar with the technical aspects of it -- they have a whole bunch of engineers who are really into the music, they've developed their own technique for doing their own, in a sense, multi-track recordings, although it's all done on multi-track machines. They have two machines and use them in a kind-of piggyback -- the technical aspects of it, I don't really understand. In the past, prior to the sessions, when people came into the BBC to record, the BBC's arrogance was such that even when the Beatles were recording, initially they wouldn't be allowed to listen to a playback of their stuff. Whoever was producing the recording would just say, That's fine, what are we going to do next, "Twist and Shout"...? And they would play "Twist and Shout." The engineer would then say, Yes, that's fine, we've got two more to do, don't forget lunch is in half-an-hour's time, let's get a move on. As far as booking the bands for the sessions, I wish I could describe some enormously efficient system, but the program usually has a producer that's responsible, doing things like booking bands and other administrative stuff within the BBC. The studio is regularly booked twice a week, and the producer might phone up and say, we don't have anybody for next Sunday, and I'll think, geeze, what records have I heard lately that I really like, or, what band have I recently seen that's really good...? And that's how it works. The producer will book the band through whichever agency, and the band will come in and do the recording.

Many of the Sessions have been released on record through the Strange Fruit label. What's their connection?

Well, years after the event that I'd suggested to the BBC in the first place that they ought to be releasing these sessions, I then also suggested it to Richard Branson [owner/impresario Virgin Records] at one stage, and he wasn't interested in doing it either, which again seemed to me to be a mistake. I have an agent who takes care of my accounts and things -- it's a couple actually, a husband and wife, they don't do anybody else, it's just me. It's a wonderful arrangement for me, because I'm like their hobby [laughs], and he'd worked for record companies before, even though neither of them are really record company people. I was talking to them about all this one day, and Clive, the husband, said, "Why don't I start a record label to put out some of these sessions?" So that's precisely what he did. My involvement with it has always been minimal. They've got my name on them -- Peel Sessions -- because that's what they're known as, but I don't derive any income from it at all. It's one of those things where people think, Jesus, you must have made all kinds of money from the Peel Sessions, but in fact, I don't get any income or expenses or commissions out of it at all.

Are all the Sessions available on record or available for release?

No. As I said, my involvement has always been fairly minimal. When it first started out, Clive and Shirley were doing it from home. They'd phone me up and ask, "What do you think about this and what do you think about that?" But negotiations to get a lot of the sessions released, particularly the early ones, were just nightmarish. You'd have to get the permission from the [artists] record company, and some of the bigger ones especially -- like CBS, which is now Sony, and, oddly enough, Virgin -- didn't want them released and simply wouldn't give permission at all. Then you'd have to get permission amazingly enough from the musicians union, which I've never quite understood. You also had to get permission from all the members of the band, and if the band had broken up acrimoniously, as many of them do, if one or two of the members said yes, then the others might inevitably say no as a matter of course. So, what they had to go through to get some of the sessions released, I can't even begin to imagine, it must have been frustrating for them. That's why we're enormously grateful to people like Joy Division and New Order, because they obviously sold a lot and the band wholeheartedly endorsed the whole idea of the sessions being released. At some stage three or four years ago, Clive and Shirley sold Strange Fruit to a distribution company, and the bloke who runs it will occasionally write me and let me know what he's doing, but usually I only find out when the records are released. There was a Wire compilation recently that I had no idea about until it arrived. People are often astonished to learn, as I say, that I don't have any financial interest in it, because if I did -- I think it would be wrong anyway, I don't think it's morally defensible -- but the thing is, it would then start to take over the Sessions function of the program. The temptation would be to try and get Bruce Springsteen [laughs] or U2 or somebody to then release a record and make loads of money. The way things are, I can just book bands that I actually like, whether they're famous or not. Mind you, it's a pity that financially it's not been possible to release on record some of the more obscure ones, because over the years there's been some really extraordinary Sessions, in fact, there's been very few bad ones. Most are superb documents.

How many Sessions have been recorded for your show?

Blimey, there's been two-a-week for nearly thirty years, so you just have to do the math.

Do you have any particular favourites?

No, not ... [pause] ... there was a Culture one that I really liked, and the two Slits Sessions, they all came out on record, but no, to pick is difficult. There have been twenty Fall Sessions, and they've all been wonderful, but there's just too many good ones to mention and too few that were disappointing.

Tell me about your obsession with The Fall. When did you first fall in love with them?

Well, I'd like to pretend it was when I first heard them, but the first couple of times I heard them I thought, y'know, this is pretty good, but I didn't immediately think or have any idea I was still going to be listening to them twenty years later on. The first time I actually saw them play live they were supporting Echo & the Bunnymen in an extremely dodgy club in Manchester. It was probably at that point that I began to think they were actually rather spectacular.

You've mentioned things on your show like your children bouncing around the house this week with the arrival of the new Fall album. Do your kids really like The Fall?

William likes The Fall, he's my eldest. He likes The Fall and techno, techno's his sort of big thing. Alexandra likes Hole and Pulp, those sorts of things; Thomas likes happy hardcore and drum-n-bass, and Flossy, who's 14, likes Blur and Oasis and Pulp and some of the things I like, but more cute bands and things.

I take it you've met Mark E. Smith?

A couple of times, but I never know what to say to him and he doesn't seem to know what to say to me, so we just punch each other on the arm in a kind of manly fashion and go our separate ways.

He seems to have an incredible work ethic.

He does. He's a very odd man. I'm sure he's a nightmare to work for. I think being a member of The Fall must be fairly awful, but at the same time there's nothing that says people who do good work have got to be nice. I'm sure Picasso was a serious pain in the ass. In fact, I think some people who are nice guys could probably use a little attitude to make the right noise.

You mentioned earlier that in the 1950s you avidly read the music papers. Do you still read NME and Melody Maker?

No, oddly enough, I don't, I just stopped reading them in the last year. As you might have noticed, they used to have a much broader perspective and field of reference, but now they seem to be operating in a strictly commercial market and their focus has become much more narrow. This is partly understandable, but they seem to have an agenda now, which wasn't there before. They want to make stars and market them to sell the papers. If they can pick up on a band and give them a lot of exposure, then the band is sort of obliged to them in a way, it's all tied up as marketing strategy. They seem to have become much more conservative papers then they were previously.

There've been a stretch of years where if your name wasn't Suede, Blur or Oasis, then you simply weren't on their covers.

That's right, and more's the pity. I mean, there's obviously been defects previously over the years, but there always seemed to be a vaguely anarchic spirit about them that was always attractive, but now I don't even bother reading them. Occasionally, I might read the record reviews, but as with any record reviews, if the reviewer agrees with you, then they're a great reviewer, and if they don't, then they don't know what they're talking about [laughs]. I don't know too many people in bands, but the ones I do are generally ones who aren't very well known, and it's especially frustrating for them to even get their records reviewed in those papers. What's terrible is that in Britain, if they don't get reviewed there, then they're not likely to get reviewed anywhere really.

The NME actually gave you a "Godlike Genius" award a couple years back. What was that all about?

It was the first time they had an awards ceremony [The Brats], which is a kind of counter to the more official industry awards ceremony [The Brit Awards] that was going on around the same time. One of the things was this Godlike Genius Award. I was very moved. It was kind-of a tongue-in-cheek thing, but at the same time, I think it was kindly and honestly meant. Because I'm rather prone to crying, I started to make a speech, but couldn't finish it because I started crying [laughs]. It was really embarrassing, but I was very moved to have won that, I must say.

What's your current workload on BBC Radio 1?

I'm down to four hours a week on the domestic service, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. The one on Saturday afternoon is from 5-to-7 immediately after the football, and then the Sunday one is 8-to-10 in the evening. In fact, I should be doing it tonight, but ironically they've got a Sex Pistols live concert on instead. The Sex Pistols are a joke now, of course. When the Sex Pistols came out, Radio 1 wouldn't have anything to do with them, but twenty years later they think it's a great idea.

You don't approve the idea of a Sex Pistols reunion?

Well, it's sad, really. If they're going to make some money out of it, it's up to them, I guess. It seems to me to be by-and-large irrelevant.

How long have you been doing the BBC World Service program?

Probably about 25 years, I think.

What sort of audience do you think you have for that show?

Absolutely no idea at all. They can't do research on it, really. I mean, they've got an idea [the BBC World Service's official estimate is 140 million weekly listeners], but I can't imagine how they'd go about doing it, and oddly enough, I don't get very much mail. It's quite a bit different doing the World Service program too, they're obviously a lot shorter, only half-an-hour, and funnily enough, I've just been recording some of the World Service programs today and it's been a bit of a problem for me. I've been getting a bit of grief from the people in London who run the World Service, they say I talk too fast and don't give enough information.

Half an hour doesn't seem long enough to play all the music and provide exhaustive information.

That's exactly what I tell them, and I've started ridiculing them slightly on a few of the programs, and said that I've edited-out some of my flattering comments and that I'm at war with them at the moment. What I do on my regular program is I like to segue the songs, and I've become the king of the tasteless segue-way. I like putting inappropriate music back-to-back, it works for me. When I sometimes hear the programs later on, I think, hey, that sounds pretty good, and I'll sometimes link the songs with a line randomly chosen from old American radio spots, but I can't do any of that on the World Service.

The program runs counter to everything else on the World Service. It's always funny to hear your program follow serious stuff like News Hour or the World Business Report, with the unholy racket of a Fall b-side.

Yes [laughs]. I occasionally catch the continuity announcers, and they'll say things like, "Now it's time for John Peel and HIS sort of music," disapprovingly. Apparently they get more complaints about my program than any other on the World Service, so I'm quite flattered by that, it always amuses me.

I've heard you say on your program that you can see your garden from your studio.

That's right, I do those from home, it's about 100 miles east of London, between Ipswich and Bury-St.-Edmund.

Bury-St.-Edmund...?

Yes, it's a very historical town. As the name implies, St. Edmund is buried there.

Neil Young once remarked that most people don't advance their musical tastes once they graduate high school. You've obviously advanced beyond this?

And so has Neil Young, I don't know how he can say that. Funnily enough, I compèred the first concert that Buffalo Springfield ever did. The first time they came out on stage, I introduced them, they were supporting the Byrds in San Bernadino. Buffalo Springfield opened the show, then was the Dillards, and then the Byrds. The Byrds were an absolutely obnoxious bunch of people. I'd obviously not met them before, and I went in to their dressing room to say, Hello, my name's John, I'm the compère; Anything you want me to say, anything you don't want me to say...? And they wouldn't speak to me at all, they were doing their L.A.-cool thing. Out in San Bernadino we were seen as the hicks, I'm pleased to say, because I've always been on the side of the hicks. They wouldn't speak, so I thought, what a bunch of bastards. But Neil was very friendly, and I had a long chat with him backstage. The sad thing is, when he played the Reading Festival last year, of course, I couldn't get even close enough to speak to him. You wanted to say, hey Neil, c'mon, this is a bit showbiz, all this crap. It's sad. That's one of the reasons I dislike the rock business really intensely. Neil Young is almost the only person of his generation who's still capable of making music that I might find interesting, so I was disappointed. The same thing happened with David Bowie. For a long time I got letters from David Bowie asking for money [laughs], for some arts lab project he had going, but then the last time I saw him, which was a long time ago, I wanted to say, Hello David, how's it going?, but he's surrounded by a gang of New York karate experts who wouldn't let you anywhere near him. You think, what the hell's gone wrong with you, have you somehow lost the plot somewhere down the line? It's a pity, but it's what the rock industry seems to want or need to do.

After all the years doing the show and listening to tens-of-thousands of records, do you ever think you'll suffer indie-rock burnout?

Right now I'm further behind than I've ever been before. If I took a month off work and didn't do anything but listen to records, I still couldn't get caught up. There's so many records being released, particularly dance 12-inches. There's just hundreds of them coming out every week and most of them seem to make their way eventually to my house. But what I do when I'm listening to stuff at home is what I do when I'm doing my program, I mix them up and put them into different piles to listen to. If I'm listening to too many dance records, then I'll put on some squeaky guitar records or something.

I take it you've got a considerable record collection?

Far too many records, yeah.

Do you have any idea how many?

Well, I know how many vinyl LPs I've got, because I have a filing system for them, and the last count was 24,362 -- I've got the card right in front of me. But as far as CDs and 7-inch singles are concerned, I've got them vaguely filed in alphabetical order, but don't know the count. Everything else is in a terrible mess. I really need to employ somebody to come and sort it all out, but I can't afford to.

You mentioned on your program a couple of months back that you were in Germany. What was the project you were working on?

Some women in Berlin were making a film about what it was like to be a punk in East Germany. If you were a punk in East Germany, you were really a punk. It wasn't a fashion thing, it was a go-to-prison-for-six-years kind-of thing, or you'd be beaten up by the police a lot and not be able to find work and be an enemy of the state. I was asked to narrate the project and was quite happy to do that. My program is carried on British Forces Broadcasting, which are broadcast in Germany, and funnily enough for the past number of years I've been voted the Top DJ in Germany. I can only count up to ten and order a couple of bottles of beer in German, that's about it, but I'm actually rather proud of the awards.

I caught a BBC documentary you did a couple weeks ago about the 40th anniversary of the Eurovision Song Contest. The music seemed almost without fail to be crap.

Of course, but that's what Eurovision is.

It was enormously entertaining. How did you get roped into doing that?

Well, if you've been doing things for as long as I have, you get to be [laughs] the only person in the organization who can compare then-and-now. Apparently, there aren't too many people with programs that feature current music in it, whose lives have been changed by Little Richard or Gene Vincent [laughs]. A lot of times you're selected automatically. If they're planning their program, they think, well, we have to go to Peel [chuckles], who else are we going to get...? To be honest with you, hardly a day goes by without some kind of an offer of a TV or radio program coming through the fax machine, but most of them are things which nobody in their right mind would want, in my view, so I just pick the ones that interest me. It's difficult because you're supposed to be really ambitious in the Britain of the 1990s, people are supposed to be aggressive and thrusting, but the thing is, I like being at home, I like being with my family. I get enough money from doing the radio programs to be able to buy a bottle of wine with our meals. None of us are into clothes, we have a couple of old cars that still work, so we don't spend too much money, and I can control the pace of my own life. There are a few things that I have to do that I'd rather not do, but they're not big things, so most of the time I do what I want to do, which is pretty neat. It's what many people spend their whole lives trying to achieve.

I suppose many of the offers come with the territory of being a celebrity.

In a sense that's the downside of it. I like doing the work, because I don't think of it as work, to be honest. If I've been able to define the kind of life I wanted to lead when I was 12, it'd pretty well be defined by what I now do. The celebrity thing is the downside, which as I say, is why I've stopped doing television, because it makes you too easily identifiable and I just find it embarrassing having strangers come up to me and ask me embarrassing questions. As a rather shy bloke, I feel very self-conscious and uncomfortable.

Lastly, any thoughts of retirement?

I want to go on doing this until I die [laughs], which I hope won't be just yet. I don't have any ambitions to do anything else. I don't want to play Hamlet, I just like doing radio programs, I really like doing them. For example, in the past three weeks, we've had a major upset here because my wife had a brain hemorrhage. She's alright now, but for 3 or 4 days it even looked as though she might easily die. I'm totally dependent upon her emotionally, in a rather alarming way, it was as awful as anything that ever happened to me. But doing the radio programs, people said, well, you don't want to do your radio program, and I did miss one, but in fact doing them was solace in a way. I did mention the fact she was ill, not to garner publicity or anything like that, but because people do take the radio program personally and are involved in it. They know me and they know the family through the program, so it didn't seem inappropriate to mention this. She's still very weak and it's going to take a long time, it could be up to three years before she's back to her best. So other than spending time with my family, the radio program is about all I want to do.

That's great to hear. Time is upon us, I know there's a big soccer game you're going to want to get ready for, so thanks very much for your time. It's been really generous of you, entertaining and educational, and I feel very privileged. All the best with the show, and good luck to England!

Thank you, it's been a pleasure, and yes, I'm expecting a really good game. Take care, bye for now.



Copyright D. G. Fisher