John Peel

Most of the music fans at work were genuinely shocked at the news of John Peel's sudden death. The list of bands he was the first to play on the radio reads like a Who's Who of British rock for the past 40 years, and I've read a great many tributes from 40-somethings for whom John Peel was the soundtrack of their teenage years.

I'm afraid I was never a big listener to his show. I spent my formative years listening to the then unfashionable rock played by Tommy Vance (so did the cat, for some strange reason), and Peel was viewed as the one who played the music that was supposed to have made the music I loved obsolete. I even remember in my student years there was a generation of old-school rock fans who bitterly hated Peel, never forgiving him for turning his back on the music he'd championed during the first half of the 70s in favour of punk and new wave.

This letter in today's Guardian typifies the views of that group of people:

John Peel's contribution to music journalism is overrated. If a piece of rock or pop music lasted more than three minutes, he had no time for it. And in the late 1970s he introduced an inverted snobbery into rock music criticism by using his position to present any band that ever tried to do something more ambitious than the working-class rants of the Sex Pistols as middle class and pretentious. Class shouldn't have a place in music, but John Peel helped keep it there for over 30 years.

Rather over the top, even if there's a little bit of a point. I think the 'anything complicated is middle class' meme should be really attributed to repellent oiks like the odious Tony Parsons rather than Peel. It's true that John Peel didn't like some genres of great music, and that music got marginalised as a result, especially in the past few years. But surely that wasn't the fault of Peel himself; rather the lack of anyone else in mainstream British radio who really loved and cared about music to the extent that he did.

A commenter on the Guardian's message boards with the handle "FlammeEmpor" presents a more balanced view:

Peel ... championed most of the now well-known late 1960s/ early 1970s rock legends, including Bowie, Zeppelin, Floyd, Yes, Genesis, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull�.(a very long list), in addition to some who did not make it to super-stardom, like Roy Harper and Peter Hammill. The rest of Radio One at that time was an abomination. (Recall the irony in the voice as John introduced 'Love Grows where my Rosemary Goes' on a TOTP retrospective. Also: voiceover to TOTP film of M. Jagger: 'Let's spend the night together..actually, on second thoughts..')

Peel claimed that sometime around the mid-seventies he became disillusioned with the 'excesses' of bands like ELP, Yes, etc. In my view said 'excess' and the 'liberation' of the music scene by punk and the new wave were a bit of a myth. While much of the punk/new wave (and beyond) were magnificent, there was much second division stuff, and some of the old bands were still turning out excellent stuff after punk had burned itself out. Punk happened to come along as some of the older bands like ELP had also burned themselves out or lost direction. Peel bought into the punk/new wave big-time and took a long time to let it go, although I recall him complaining in 1980 specifically that there was a 'lot of second division stuff' around. He then spent years getting more hardcore and obscurist, and yet remained the best thing on radio. During the punk era he tended to wind up the old bands, and even some of the softer new bands, like the Boomtown Rats, but stood by The Doors, Pink Floyd � The Wall, Peter Hammill, Ivor Cutler, etc. Even the other year at Glastonbury, during the Roger Waters set, he said (probably about 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun', etc.): 'You wouldn't believe the effect of that when it first came out � could change your life'.

But in the end there was no-one else quite like him, even if Sturgeon's law applied to the stuff he played. He will be missed, even by those who seldom ever listened to his show.

What's the live music scene up in Heaven like, John? I've heard the power trio of Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott and Keith Moon are really hot.