John Peel Week

Peels relationship with prog was strange. He once said that one of his most memorable experiences was hearing Floyd do 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' in some small theatre venue. He said it was the beginning of something 'great' He also loved Tull, pursuaded Doug Smith to Sign Hawkwind and had enormous admiration for VDGG and believe it or not Queen!!!

According to Ian Anderson, Peel stopped supporting any band as soon as they hit the big time. He couldn't get enough of Tull, but as soon as Aqualung sold big, he would literally cross the road to avoid having to speak to any of them. In fact he never spoke to them again.

That said, he extended the same courtesy/discourtesy to New Order and The Cure, one of his Indie 'babies'

The Peel album is bound to be comprised of the most popular of the 'wierd' artists he promoted. That way it sells the most copies. No one has heard of Soft Machine or the Nice. Certainly, not the sort of people who grew up with Peel in the 80's and beyond, and this is probably aimed at them. It's a shame I agree, but quite predictable.

I think John Peel was generally referring to the likes of Yes, Tull, Genesis and ELP when he referred to progressive rock, and I think that with the exception of Tull (who he championed in their very early career) he never had much time for any of them. He also championed Henry Cow, Tangerine Dream, Can and Faust along with many other avant prog and krautrock bands. It's true that he tended to lose interest in artists who became successful, but this meant that his show always featured something new. Quite a lot of the artists he gave airtime to were rubbish, but the list of acts across all genres that received their first break on his show is highly impressive. For all his show's faults, it's a good example of of public broadcasting at its best; no commercial station would ever have given so much airtime over so many years to music with no obvious commercial potential.

He was a Liverpool supporter who played Henry Cow and Captain Beefheart on national radio, which may not qualify him for canonisation but puts him on the side of the angels.

You've got to give the man credit for giving airplay to lots of new bands and he was a major figure in UK music for sure, but the "Saint John" hagiography does get on my wick.

He probably ended up being too influential and his views on prog became a received wisdom. He helped entrench the attitude of "talented musicians being ambitious is boring, pretentious and contrary to the Spirit of Rock 'n' Roll" which still pervades today.

I think this sort of narrow-mindedness damaged the commercial success of British music post-1976 by dissing the culture of good musicianship - personified by the bands he hated such as Yes, ELP, Genesis, Purple, Zep etc who were huge around the world.

Yet now we have reached a stage where the US Top 100 sometimes features no UK albums and a small country like Sweden probably produces more interesting and adventurous bands. Obviously I'm not saying JP is solely responsible for this but he certainly contributed!

Blacksword wrote: I know he hated Yes! It's true what you say, Syzygy, he was unique in that he played what he wanted. I think his argument was that there was no point in investing any energy/airtime to bands that had 'made it' simply because they had 'made it' and therefore no longer needed his supprt as they were being supported by the daytime radio DJ's. He saw his job as promoting new and obscure music.

Funny that he hated Yes, as on the 2cd set 'Something's Coming' from their early BBC sessions, there is music from 'Top Gear', which he hosted at the time I believe. He also claimed a few years ago 'Roxy Music and Genesis were the only bands in the early 70s that had anything new'; whether we agree with that or not it irrelevant, the point I'm making is that I am not convinced he hated prog or 70s rock as much as he claimed to; rather he was 'keeping up with the Joneses', so to speak, by joining in with the dissenters of prog that was undoubtedly rife in the late 70s. I also remember a few years ago hearing Peter Hammill on his show too....

Also, he actually ran one of the very earliest 'progressive' labels with Dandelion, which came about at about 1968/9. It was certainly a disparate collection of artists, including a has been Gene Vincent, Medicine Head, Stackwaddy and Bridget St John, plus housed Kevin Coyne and his band Siren and a pre fame Clifford T. Ward. Very few of these albums ever sold anything so I am led to believe, but he obviously was a pioneer in the 'progressive' record industry, as labels like Vertigo and Dawn all followed in Dandelion's wake.

By the way, there was a complete edition of Top Gear on BBC Radio 6- lots of great stuff, including Tomorrow, Amen Corner, Nirvana (the UK pop psych troop) plus Traffic and Pink Floyd in session.