Check out Beeb’s Peel Night while you can!
By default the BBC only keeps their radio shows on-line for a week, and if they stick to that policy then all the wonderful John Peel Day shows will disappear tomorrow night (UK time) so listen while you can! There’s some great stuff and I highly recommend it. Also be sure to catch Annie Nightingale’s excellent show featuring some brill dance/DJ/grime work recorded in session for Peel over the years. I don’t know why she’s not listed on the “official program“, but there’s some great stuff here from people like Orbital and from a ton of DJs I’ve never heard of but which definitely kick ass.
I could go through the many highlights of these great shows, but there are just too many to make sense out of. I think the best bits, though, tended to be when the musicians talked about how important he was for them and how much he meant to them. And I think it’s telling that they often started by talking about the influence he had on their record collections and ideas about what music was and could be, and only after that did they talk about how cool it was to have him play their music. Most radio (and Big Media) is about creating and controlling consumers. John was a brilliant example of that all-too-rare alternative, where media is a tool for creating a community where people grow and develop, and where their possibilities are expanded instead of constrained. John didn’t (just) make customers that bought music, he helped people wrestle with music, whether as “just” listeners or (as obviously happened with remarkable frequency) as producers as well.
Or, as Thom Yorke of Radiohead put it in a recorded message they played on the show:
Dear John Peel - Wherever you are, thank you very much for all the music that you played over the years to me on my radio. Blew my mind, and changed the way I thought.
Amen, brother.
I think one of the tricky things about all this (very genuine) adoration is captured in the oft heard comment that this needed to become an annual event. That could be really cool, but only if it increasingly focuses on the future of the music rather than the past. The risk of hanging something like this on a giant like Peel is that we engage in an increasingly nostalgic wallowing that would in the end be completely contrary to the spirit of John and his shows. In my tribute show (which almost no one heard because KUMM’s streaming was down :-( ), for example, I only played 2 or 3 tracks from 2005 in a 2.5 hour show. I played a lot of great music, but given that John played almost nothing but new music, one could argue that my show missed an important piece of the point. That’s probably OK for now, as the pain of loss is still fairly raw. But next year? Five years from now? Probably not a good thing to keep playing Fall session tracks and “Teenage kicks” every year, no matter how good they are.
So go have a listen to these great shows while you can and raise a glass to this remarkable life; the world will definitely be a poorer place for John’s passing. Then go listen to a live show by a band you’ve never heard of, or check out a weird record, or do something to stretch your head.
That’s the real tribute.
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