f**k John Peel, Scouse twat.
1. "Emerson, Lake & Palmer are a tragic waste of talent and energy". John Peel 1970
2. He was an avid supporter of the Red Shite, Liverpool FC, so much so that the silly pillock used Anfield as the middle name of 2 of his 3 children. ***.
OK, only kidding, possibly. He had a massive influence and I wish I had more ready access to his show. I can't stand reggae but he did play a lot of the cutting edge stuff first. The Smiths' John Peel sessions are amazing, there's so many others.
Of course,
not everyone thought Peel was a god:
QUOTE
I hated him in the Seventies, too, because he liked punk, long after punk - the whitest, malest, most asexual music ever - should have been left to die an unnatural death. I'd been a punk, and knew that the whole thing was, frankly, shit in safety pins. We came to bury the music industry; we ended up giving it one almighty shot in the arm.
In the Eighties, someone gave me as a kitsch gift a Sixties pop annual. I'll never forget John Peel in it, talking about his father's absence during his infancy: \"He was off playing soldiers.\" Reader, this man was fighting in the second world war. What did YOU do in the war, Daddy?
Well, John Peel caught VD, and banged on about it. Until recently, Peel banged on a lot about sex. Like many an ugly Englishman, he went to America, where that nation's young women found a Limey accent so beguiling that they barely looked at the face it came out of: \"All they wanted me to do was abuse them, sexually, which, of course, I was only too happy to do,\"
Peel told the Guardian in 1975. \"Girls,\" he said to the Sunday Correspondent in 1989, \"used to queue up outside. Oral sex they were particularly keen on, I remember one of my regular customers, as it were, turned out to be 13, though she looked older.\"
This was the Sixties. Fleeing America after the authorities quite rightly objected to him having sex with young teenage girls, Peel was joined by his wife, Shirley, a Texan girl, who was 15 when he married her. Talking to the Correspondent about this young woman, now dead by her own hand, Peel seems strangely censorious: \"She fell in with some extremely dodgy people she married three more times after me, and I was the only husband by whom she didn't have a child.
All the children were in care. She did some terrible things, you know. She didn't deserve to die, though.\" Somebody give that man a medal!
I like the part in bold, me being a Brit man lover, as it were. And Burchill's wrong about one thing: prog rock was and is and always will be the "whitest, malest, most asexual music ever".
RIP John Peel.