Remembering John Peel

The veteran broadcaster died six years ago today but his bravery is missed more than ever

Posted Monday, 25 October 2010 by Ben Patashnik in

Blog

Music is the simplest of joys – press a button, hear some sound, be happy. And for John Peel simplicity was key: no need to worry oneself with trends, genre, playlists or anything other than does this song sound good? As a BBC Radio DJ he was considered the corporation’s most adventurous broadcaster but skipping between death metal, post-punk, hip-hop and electro in the course of a single show wasn’t adventurous to him. It was just… the right thing to do. Why bother splitting music up into anything other than ‘good’ or ‘bad’? In fact, why bother doing even that? Just listen to something enough times until it feels right.

Listening to Peel was like being led by the hand into the wide world. Where some DJs would feel it was their duty to educate and proselytize Peel would say: 'Here are some songs. I like them.' The first time I ever heard death metal was about 10pm on Radio 1 during one of his shows, which was probably around 1991. Isn’t that practically unthinkable now? And to be perfectly honest I don’t remember loving absolutely everything he played – as an eight-year-old hearing something like Billy Bragg sandwiched between Napalm Death and The Fall was a jolt to say the least – but I certainly remember loving the fact there was someone living in my radio who played whatever the hell they wanted to play. His affection for music was infectious and the little mistakes that dogged his shows – not being able to find the right record or playing a song at the wrong speed – became his hallmarks.

It’s hard to say whether Peel left a legacy either at the BBC or in broadcasting as a whole – he touched my life most with his musical choices but in later life, as he was marginalised by the corporation and pushed into the margins and subsequently onto Radio 4, he became something of a familiar voice for the nation as a whole – but what I do know is that there are thousands of people around the world who felt a profound loss when he died in 2004. While Radio 1 employs moronic overbiters called things like Nick Grimshaw and Fearne Cotton and music is continually ghettoised into genre or even place of origin we move further and further away from Peel’s ideal; that is, a world where music is music is music. But the best way to ‘keep it Peel’ as the hashtag suggests is just to switch your brain off and listen to some songs and not think about anything as crass as whether or not you should ‘like’ it. Music is there to entertain us, it’s there for us to love: so why don’t we let it?