Good Night and Good Riddance: How 35 Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Life review – a bravura work

A biography of John Peel that weaves its way through 265 of his shows is a masterwork of close listening and scholarship

More than 10 years after his untimely death, John Peel – as an idea, a symbol, a cluster of fonder-than-fond memories, perhaps a reproachful ghost – still exerts a spell over the present. Countless websites and online forums are devoted to uploading and distributing home-taped recordings of his shows. BBC Radio 6 Music has inaugurated an annual lecture in his name. The Glastonbury festival has a John Peel stage. There’s a John Peel Centre for Creative Arts in Stowmarket. In 2012, the BBC, which never seemed sure whether he was a marvel or a menace, renamed a wing of Broadcasting House after him. Given that the man claimed – not always definitively – to be more interested in the future than in the past, are these tributes in actual fact betrayals? Might they be efforts to cover a cultural wound whose severity cannot be fully confronted?

For David Cavanagh, Peel was a curator who turned the airwaves into the boldest public gallery and most liberated pedagogic space imaginable. He was an artist who “displayed a form of erudite, neo-anarchic, abstract expressionist fearlessness”. The pirate DJ who went legit without allowing himself to become tamed; a significant player in the late-60s counterculture who held on to many of its values but also – sometimes to the chagrin of his admirers – championed sounds they found alien or even reprehensible; the midwife to countless outsider artists (David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Genesis) who later became globe-engirdling rock behemoths, Peel saw himself as a Reithian. He didn’t believe in streaming culture’s narrow-casting and privatisation of pop, or that the public knows what it wants, and certainly not the Conservative party’s mantra that pop music broadcasting is best served by market forces.

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