John Peel

John Peel (born August 30, 1939, Heswall, Cheshire, England—died October 25, 2004, Cuzco, Peru) was a popular British disc jockey who for nearly 40 years, beginning in mid-1960s, was one of the most influential tastemakers in rock music. Peel was renowned for discovering and championing emerging artists and for his connoisseurship of groundbreaking offbeat music and performers.

The son of a cotton merchant, he grew up in upper-middle-class comfort near Liverpool, for whose powerhouse football (soccer) team he developed a lifelong obsession. After attending boarding school and a stint in the military, he emigrated to the United States in 1960—to Dallas, Texas, where, still using his given last name, Ravenscroft, he worked at the Cotton Exchange and then sold insurance. In 1961 he landed his first (unpaid) job as a disc jockey, at station WRR. Thereafter, as the British Invasion, led by the Liverpudlian Beatles, swept the United States, he capitalized on his Scouse accent, and, though he had left England before the advent of “Merseybeat,” he became its authentic ambassador on local American airwaves.

After working at radio stations in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and San Bernardino, California, he returned to the United Kingdom in 1967 to host his late-night, hippy-trippy Perfumed Garden on pirate Radio London. While his fellow deejays cultivated wild and crazy personalities, Ravenscroft, having adopted the last name Peel as a pirate mask, was droll and unflappable but ever the iconoclast. Still, when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) established Radio 1 in September 1967 in response to the challenge of pirate radio, Peel was one of the new network’s original recruits.

From then until the early 21st century, Peel was the advocate for new and often challenging music, playing recordings to which a less adventurous broadcaster or less committed music enthusiast would likely not have given airtime. In the process he became enamored of everything from art rock to punk, post-punk, and beyond, introducing his audience to previously “unknown” artists such as David Bowie, Joy Division, the Smiths, Billy Bragg, and countless performers who flooded his mailbox with demo tapes. Meanwhile, he remained steadfastly loyal to an eclectic array of personal favorites that included Captain Beefheart, oddball poet-singer Ivor Cutler, unconventional songwriter Kevin Coyne, abrasive rockers the Fall, Northern Ireland’s Undertones (whose “Teenage Kicks” was Peel’s all-time favorite song), the ethereal Cocteau Twins, and PJ Harvey. Yet the same breadth of taste that tested the boundaries of what could be broadcast on the BBC could also find room for a good-time group like the Faces—Peel famously mimed the mandolin part from Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” (1971) on Top of the Pops—and an unlikely love affair with the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual competition sponsored by state-run European television stations to determine the best new pop song.

Never particularly adept technologically (he occasionally played records at the wrong speed), Peel was nevertheless seemingly ageless and effortlessly hip. He was a perennial choice as NME magazine’s favorite deejay of the year, and his year-end “best-of” playlist, the Festive 50, conferred significant cachet for those who found their way onto it, much as his longtime involvement with the Glastonbury Festival helped ensure its status as one of the world’s premiere rock festivals. Likewise, being chosen to record a live Peel Session for his show was a sign of arrival. Those thousands of sessions—many of which were released as commercial recordings—originated as a work-around response to needle time, a longtime requirement of British broadcasting that limited the amount of airtime that could be devoted to playing records. Even after the repeal of this requirement, Peel Sessions remained the signature and mainstay of his program.

Peel was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998. He died of a heart attack while on vacation in South America in 2004. On the anniversary of his last appearance on BBC, the network annually presents an annual celebration, John Peel Day.