Smiling and exquisitely frayed
As we head into the time of year at which the Festive Fifty was unveiled, thoughts turn to our old Uncle John. Actually he’s never far from my thoughts – all sorts of associations trigger his memory. The thread of Peel’s influence is stitched throughout five decades of popular music’s development, after all. In all [...]
Goodbye it’s 1987
Attentive readers with long memories will recall that I had embarked on a series of scans of pages from my 1980s fanzines. The undertaking got derailed by a mixture of an antiquated scanner finally meeting its match in the form of Windows Vista, and my depression at the awfulness of the majority of the contents [...]
Young tongues need taste
A Peel listener with archival tendencies, I was always going to be a sucker for The Peel sessions, Ken Garner’s updated version of his earlier book In session tonight. The story of how the sessions developed within the BBC is fascinating, and producers like Peel’s first at Radio One, Bernie Andrews, emerge from the background [...]
Why we fight
As per usual, I’m turning up for the match just as everyone is streaming away from the ground. In fact I am almost certainly the night watchman, employed to keep an eye on the stadium when no-one else is around. Nevertheless, I should capture my responses to these questions now, more or less at the [...]
