John Peel
John Robert Parker Ravenscroft OBE (30 August 1939 – 25 October 2004), better known as John Peel, was an English radio presenter and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original disc jockeys on BBC Radio 1, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004.
"Peel Sessions" redirects here. For all albums titled "Peel Sessions" or similar, see Peel Sessions (disambiguation). For a list of all bands who recorded Peel sessions, see List of Peel sessions.
Peel was one of the first broadcasters to play psychedelic rock and progressive rock records on British radio. He is widely acknowledged for promoting artists of many genres, including pop, dub reggae, punk rock and post-punk, electronic music and dance music, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip hop. Fellow DJ Paul Gambaccini described Peel as "the most important single person in popular music from approximately 1967 through 1978. He broke more important artists than any individual."[1]
Peel's Radio 1 shows were notable for the regular "Peel sessions", which usually consisted of four songs recorded by an artist in the BBC's studios, often providing the first major national coverage to bands that later achieved fame. The annual Festive Fifty countdown of his listeners' favourite records of the year was a notable part of his promotion of new music.[2]
Peel appeared on television occasionally as one of the presenters of Top of the Pops in the 1980s, and provided voice-over commentary for a number of BBC programmes. He became popular with the audience of BBC Radio 4 for his Home Truths programme, which ran from the 1990s, featuring unusual stories from listeners' domestic lives.
Early life[edit]
Peel was born John Robert Parker Ravenscroft at a nursing home in Heswall on 30 August 1939,[3][4] the son of Joan Mary (née Swainson)[4] and cotton merchant Robert Leslie Ravenscroft.[4][5] He had two younger brothers and grew up in the nearby village of Burton.[5] He was educated as a boarder at Shrewsbury School,[6] where future Monty Python member Michael Palin was his contemporary.[7] In his posthumously published autobiography, Peel said that he was raped by an older pupil while at the school.[8]
Peel was an avid radio listener and record collector from an early age, firstly of music offered by the American Forces Network and Radio Luxembourg.[9] He recalled an early desire to host a radio programme of his own "so that I could play music that I heard and wanted others to hear".[9] His housemaster, R. H. J. Brooke, whom Peel described as "extraordinarily eccentric" and "amazingly perceptive", wrote on one of his school reports, "Perhaps it's possible that John can form some kind of nightmarish career out of his enthusiasm for unlistenable records and his delight in writing long and facetious essays."[10]
Peel completed his national service in 1959 in the Royal Artillery as a B2 radar operator.[11] Afterwards, he worked as a mill operative at Townhead Mill in Rochdale[12] and returned each weekend to Heswall on a scooter borrowed from his sister. While in Rochdale during the week, he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in the area of Milkstone Road and Drake Street, and developed long-term associations with the town as the years progressed.
Career[edit]
United States[edit]
In 1960, aged 21, Peel went to the United States to work for a cotton producer who had business dealings with his father.[13] He took a number of other jobs afterwards, including working as a travelling insurance salesman. While in Dallas, Texas, where the insurance company he worked for was based, he conversed with the presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, and his running mate Lyndon B. Johnson, who were touring the city during the 1960 election campaign, and took photographs of them. Following Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Peel passed himself off as a reporter for the Liverpool Echo in order to attend the arraignment of Lee Harvey Oswald. He and a friend can be seen in the footage of the 22/23 November midnight press conference at the Dallas Police Department when Oswald was paraded before the media.[14] He later phoned in the story to the Echo.
While working for the insurance company, Peel wrote programs for punched card entry for an IBM 1410 computer (which led to his entry in Who's Who noting him as a former computer programmer), and he got his first radio job working unpaid for WRR (AM) in Dallas. There, he presented the second hour of the Monday night programme Kat's Karavan, which was primarily hosted by the American singer and radio personality Jim Lowe. Following this, and as Beatlemania hit the United States, Peel was hired by the Dallas radio station KLIF as the official Beatles correspondent on the strength of his connection to Liverpool. He later worked for KOMA in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, until 1965, when he moved to KMEN in San Bernardino, California, and used his birth name, John Ravenscroft, to present the breakfast show.[15]
Return to England[edit]
Peel returned to England in early 1967 and found work with the offshore pirate radio station Radio London.[16] He was offered the midnight-to-two shift, which gradually developed into a programme, The Perfumed Garden.
Peel's show was an outlet for the music of the UK underground scene. He played classic blues, folk music and psychedelic rock, with an emphasis on the new music emerging from Los Angeles and San Francisco. As important as the musical content of the programme was the personal – sometimes confessional – tone of Peel's presentation, and the listener participation it engendered. Underground events he had attended during his periods of shore leave, such as the UFO Club and the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, together with causes célèbres like the drug busts of the Rolling Stones and John "Hoppy" Hopkins, were discussed between records. All this was far removed from Radio London's daytime format. Listeners sent Peel letters, poems and records from their own collections so that the programme became a vehicle for two-way communication; by the final week of Radio London he was receiving far more mail than any other DJ on the station.[17]
After the closure of Radio London in 1967, Peel wrote a column, The Perfumed Garden, for the underground newspaper the International Times (from autumn 1967 to mid-1969).
Personal life[edit]
Marriages[edit]
At the age of 25, while residing in Dallas in 1965, Peel married 15-year-old American girl Shirley Anne Milburn.[27] The marriage was never happy, with reports that she was often violent towards him. Although she accompanied Peel back to England in 1967, they were soon separated and the divorce became final in 1973. Milburn later took her own life.[28]
Peel married Sheila Gilhooly on 31 August 1974. The reception was held at Regent's Park, with Rod Stewart as best man.[29] In the 1970s, Peel and Gilhooly moved to "Peel Acres", a thatched cottage in Great Finborough. In later years, Peel broadcast many of his shows from a studio in the house, with Gilhooly and their children often being involved or at least mentioned. Peel's passion for Liverpool FC was reflected in his children's names: William Robert Anfield Ravenscroft, Alexandra Mary Anfield Ravenscroft, Thomas James Dalglish Ravenscroft, and Florence Victoria Shankly Ravenscroft. Thomas, now better known as Tom Ravenscroft, also became a radio DJ.[30]
Allegations of sexual misconduct[edit]
Peel has been accused of sexual misconduct, although he was never charged with any offences. His first marriage to Milburn in 1965 has been cited as an example, given her age of 15 and his age of 25 when they married, however this was legal in Texas at the time.[32][33]
Peel told The Guardian in 1975 that when it came to young women, "All they wanted me to do was abuse them, sexually, which, of course, I was only too happy to do."[34][35] He told The Sunday Correspondent in 1989, "Girls used to queue up outside. By and large not usually for shagging. Oral sex they were particularly keen on, I remember. [...] One of my, er, regular customers, as it were, turned out to be 13, though she looked older."[36][37] He jokingly added that he "didn't ask for ID".[35][37] An interview originally published in The Herald in April 2004 stated that he admitted to sexual contact with "an awful lot" of underage girls. He said that the only available women in the early 1960s were in high school.[27]
In 2012, a woman stated that she had a three-month affair with Peel in 1969, when she was 15 and he was 30.[38][35][39] She said they had unprotected sex; this was shortly after Peel discussed contracting a sexually transmitted disease.[38] The relationship resulted in a "traumatic" abortion.[32][38] She stated that, "Looking back, it was terribly wrong and I was perhaps manipulated."[38]
In July 2022, a petition was launched to rename the "John Peel Stage" at the Glastonbury Festival due to the sexual abuse of which Peel was accused.[40] In 2023, the stage was renamed "Woodsies"; Emily Eavis, co-organiser of Glastonbury Festival, said the name change "was not related to a recent petition".[41][42]