I have only ever really wanted to be two people. One, as you know, is Harold Ross of the New Yorker.
The other is John Peel. Which is odd, in a way, when you consider that John Peel was (and how fiercely that “was” jars the typing fingers) a London radio DJ and I have spent my entire life about as far away from England as it is possible to be. But it also, maybe, serves to highlight the extent to which Peel loomed large over the lives of anybody interested in the popular music of the second half of the last century that, even in rural Australia (not exactly the “outback”, but two hours by car from Melbourne, the nearest city), a teenager could be profoundly influenced by this bearded gentleman known only through his regular namechecks in the pages of the NME.
Towards the end of 2003 I discovered that I was able to stream his regular BBC1 programme through the Internet at work. One of my first thoughts was, I suppose the old bugger will retire now. Well, as it turns out, he didn’t get the chance to retire (not that you can imagine him ever having wanted to); his cold dead hand was, at the end, as firmly on the pulse of the independent music scene as it had ever been: who else has been giving regular airtime to Maher Shalal Hash Baz, say, or Vive la Fete? His shows were always patchy, but there was also a sense that if you didn’t like the song he was playing you only had to wait for it to end and something better would come along.
The show was one thing. It is now consigned to the annals. But Peel’s real legacy lies in the vault after vault of recordings known as Peel Sessions: get a band into the studio and have them perform four songs; commit those to tape; play them on the show; and, if they turned out to be of some consequence (as they so often did), make records out of them. The sessions served two purposes: to give an opportunity to a bunch of kids that they may never otherwise get; and to document bands at different stages of their development, in the absence of outside producers, studio trickery and the like.
Putting to one side The Fall (always a special case - and, outside of Peel’s immediate family, there is nobody that I can imagine feeling more gutted at this moment in time than Mark E Smith), my candidates for definitive Peel Sessions subjects would be The Smiths and Magazine. The Smiths because, like a lot of people, I was first blown away by them when somebody on 3RRR got his hands on the first batch of Smiths Peel Sessions and played them on his show. The Smiths never sounded like this again. That rawness, freshness and sheer excitement was to be cruelly erased from their sound by the anaemic production given by John Porter to the eponymous first album. Okay, “The Queen Is Dead” is unarguably their masterpiece, but by then they were quite a different band: three albums in, considerable fame, a touch jaded and bickering amongst themselves. I can often be found arguing that the best Smiths album is actually “Hatful of Hollow”, primarily because of the BBC sessions it contains, and in the absence of which it may be hard to remember what made the fuss that was made over The Smiths so much more intense and obsessive than the usual fuss that surrounds a “new” sound (actually an old sound revisited).
In the case of Magazine, what the four Peel Sessions contained in the Magazine box set reveal is a quite different band trajectory from that found on their studio recordings (this also makes “Play” one of the small handful of “necessary” live recordings). Magazine, much neglected these days, made the unintentional mistake of releasing albums that didn’t really serve to accurately reflect what the band were about. Listening in particular to the second and third of the sessions they did with Peel, what is striking is how well he captured a band at successive creative peaks, and how poorly the contemporaneous album releases served to do so. Not that there is anything at all wrong with “Secondhand Daylight” and “The Correct Use Of Soap” (the latter being one of my desert island records, truth be told), but both albums do seem to be skewed towards the “art-rock” end of the post-punk spectrum. The Peel Sessions, on the other hand, throw you into a maelstrom every bit as focussed and intense as that generated by, say, The Stooges at their peak. Which, if not for Peelie, nobody now would be aware of.
You will no doubt have examples of your own.
The Peel Sessions serve to document a kind of alternative history of the era. Of a couple of eras, in fact. Eras that all of those CD-Rs and seven-inch singles that would have been in the post to Peel’s producer last Tuesday will, sadly, not be a part of.
