Once renowned for the stiffness of their upper lips, the British sometimes seem to have lurched to the other extreme. Nowadays they are in danger of becoming notorious for excessive emotionalism. On the right of the political spectrum there are those who believe that extravagant displays of feeling — such as the outpouring of public grief occasioned by the death of Princess Diana in 1997 — are symptomatic of British decadence.
This latter-day British trend was in evidence again the other week following the announcement of the death of the much-loved broadcaster, John Peel. At a time of grave international developments, news bulletins in Britain were dominated by the 65-year— old disc jockey’s sudden death from a heart attack while on holiday in Peru. Plangent tributes from musicians and fans of his BBC radio shows poured in, with Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair hastening to associate himself with the general mourning.
Yet there were good reasons why many in Britain, and not just in Britain, should have felt Peel’s loss so keenly. For John Peel was one of the great mavericks of British broadcasting, a charismatic individualist who for the best part of forty years had been a large and humane presence in British public life. Indeed, his contribution in terms of educating successive generations of listeners in the mind-boggling diversity of contemporary music could hardly be exaggerated. There was a stock pious phrase once beloved of obituarists: “He touched the life of his time at many points”. Such could certainly be said of the late John Peel.
The role Peel carved out for himself was that of a people’s friend, a sort of anti-celebrity with a trademark line in self-deprecating wit. This was the more remarkable since his own origins were impeccably upper middle class. An alumnus of Shrewsbury public school, Peel (whose real name was Ravenscroft) rebelled against the Victorian formality of his upbringing. For him — as for so many of his generation — hearing Elvis Presley for the first time in 1956 was an epiphanic experience, a life-changing event. Following a stint as a national serviceman (still compulsory for young men in 1950s Britain), the rock-and-roll-fixated Peel decided to try his luck in America. In the early 1960s, when young Americans were thrilling to Presley’s British rivals, The Beatles, he was working on a radio station in Dallas, Texas. Born near Liverpool, the group’s birthplace, Peel affected an up market Liverpool accent and capitalized on the ‘Beatlemania’ that was sweeping the US.
Returning to Britain in 1967 with sheaves of records by the strange new west coast bands of the period, The Doors prominent among them, he found employment as a DJ on the US-owned pirate station Radio London (which was based on a ship in the North Sea). As the era of love and peace dawned, Peel styled himself a hippy and built up a cult following with his exotic late night music show, The Perfumed Garden.
That he was a radio natural was apparent from the outset. Throughout his career, his listeners felt they knew Peel intimately — though their relationship was actually with an artfully constructed persona and the quirky world, the alternative Britain of the airwaves, which he conjured up.
In the course of 1967, pirate radio was outlawed by the British government and Peel joined the BBC. He was to work for the corporation without interruption for the rest of his life. His good fortune was to find himself caught up in a musical revolution. Led by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones but soon to embrace a brilliant constellation of indigenous talent, the British rock culture of the late 1960s was rapidly emerging as an epoch-making global force. Peel exploited his good fortune to the hilt and secured a niche for himself in pop cultural history. Championing artists he believed in regardless of their marketability, he was nothing less than the midwife of Britain’s progressive music scene.
It was Peel’s sublime indifference to commercial considerations and single-minded determination to break new ground that made him a hero to great numbers of musicians and fans over the four decades spanned by his career: Internationally acclaimed British artists like The Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart and David Bowie were much indebted to his proselytizing. The tearful reaction to his death owes more than a little to a gloomy suspicion that there will never again be anybody quite like him.
What is remarkable is that this resolutely unglamorous broadcaster became a national institution during an era when radio appeared to have been supplanted by television and when the media in general was growing ever more subject to the dictates of fashion and big business. Nurtured by the BBC radio culture of the 1940s and 50s, Peel may well be remembered as the last great representative of the public service ethos established by the BBC’s high-minded Scottish founder, Lord Reith. Without it, his whimsical, instructive, uncompromising career would scarcely have been feasible. One musician described Peel as a natural democrat, but inside the democrat was an aristocrat of taste, a discreet cultural elitist convinced that he knew what was best for people. Peel saw his role not as giving the public what it wanted but what it did not yet know that it wanted.
Latterly, he attracted fresh devotees with his family-orientated program, Home Truths. Much given to talking about his wife and four children, the aging iconoclast alienated some old music fans with his tendency to sentimentalize the experiences of ordinary people. The truth was that he had always been a highly emotional human being whose ardor for life-affirming new music helped lay to rest the repressed and regimented Britain bequeathed by the Victorians. It was the largeness of spirit exemplified by John Peel that many hoped they were voting for when they chose Tony Blair as Britain’s prime minister.
— Neil Berry is a freelance journalist based in London.
