Can't Stand Up for Falling Down by Allan Jones

Author:Allan Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

JOHN PEEL

London, August 1978

I arrive at Broadcasting House to interview John Peel for what used to be Melody Maker, to find the legendary DJ waiting outside for me with John Walters, his friend and long-time producer.

“Where have you been?” Walters wants to know, before I’m halfway out of the cab. “They’ve been open for 15 minutes,” he shouts over his shoulder, heading with some vigour towards a favourite local hostelry.

I know Walters from the better kind of record company reception, to which he is prone to turn up and loudly regale anyone within earshot with hilarious tales, usually involving much quaffing with the likes of Keith Moon and Viv Stanshall.

I know Peel from the radio, of course. Growing up in a remote geographical alcove of South Wales, I couldn’t get Peel on pirate radio, so didn’t hear his Perfumed Garden show. But I listened regularly to Top Gear, the weekend show on Radio One he originally co-presented before eventually going, as it were, solo. Peel also had a late-night midweek show called Night Ride, which featured an amazing mix of exotic music, poetry and weekly updates on the diverse adventures and humorous antics of his pet hamsters, be-whiskered coves who provided him with much raw material for comic banter and whimsical reflection.

Peel and Walters ran Top Gear like a private fiefdom within the BBC, untouchable for as long as Peel’s popularity is undiminished. This allowed them to get away with, for instance, the appearance on Top Gear of classical Indian sitar player Imrat Kahn.

“Now that,” Walters admits with a huge laugh, banging down pints of fearsomely foaming ale on the table where Peel and I are sitting, “provoked a great number of complaints.”

“A factory in South London,” Peel adds, “went on strike.”

“He did two 30-minute ragas and we put them both out on the same show,” Walters guffaws. “On a Saturday afternoon, for God’s sake. People went berserk.”

Peel has long-since been removed from his influential weekend show, and for the last 18 months has been presenting a show that goes out from 10–12, five nights a week.

“It’s a smaller audience than we were used to on Top Gear,” Peel says, of listening figures for the weekday shows. “I suppose it must fluctuate between 100,000 and 250,000. When you think in terms of the 96 million who are supposed to listen each day with great enthusiasm to Tony Blackburn, it probably doesn’t sound like very many. On the other hand, it’s Hampden Park filled out a few times – and if you ever got out onto the centre circle to speak to them all it would be a rather intimidating prospect.”

So who listens to him these days?

“Apparently, I’ve got a lot of listeners in places like central Scotland,” he says. “In areas where people haven’t got a lot of money and there isn’t much going on. And a lot of people listen in prisons and borstals. This might sound like romantic, left-wing fantasising, but frankly I’d rather work for them than some of the record companies.

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