A year ago yesterday top DJ & revered man of the airwaves, John Peel, died. There have been several commemorative events throughout the UK, indicating that, whilst his loss is felt keenly still, his inspiration continues to vitalise the nation’s independent music scene.
In a rare excursion outside the territories of the blogosphere, I sent the following memoir to Word magazine. Six months later I received an email from Mark Ellen, the editor, expressing great appreciation & his regrets that the item had only just worked its way to the top of his email pile. I mailed him back by return with my two rock’n’roll stories & stunned him into complete silence…
I knew John slightly, or maybe more accurately, intermittently. We met first in the clammy but ragrant surroundings of Covent Garden’s Middle earth in 1967. He was spinning the imported goodies from One Stop Records in South Moulton Street & I was enjoying my 15 minutes of fame as the bassplayer of The Nervous System. He emerged from behind the turntable at the moment I headed for the stairs for a breath of real London air & a cheese roll at the all-night market stall & we exited together.
We found we had much in common. We were both hopelessly sartorially uncool, wearing, as I recall, drab Levi needle cords with bilious-coloured frilly-fronted shirts that we felt, a little wistfully, the chicks might dig. A discussion on the pressures and pitfalls of selecting authentically groovy costumery led on to a consideration of the possibilities of an enormous jumper that might accommodate several people. Up to ten we felt might be feasible. We speculated on the effects that such a manifestation might have on the straights in Oxford Street. And, as dawn rose, we admitted to each other a fundamental sense of unease amongst the terminally hip cognoscenti who were still coiling & weaving to Jefferson Airplane beneath our feet.
We met up from time to time over the years. But mainly we exchanged letters & postcards, all couched in some stylistic variation of the public school novels & tales of pluck & peril of our youth. Once, memorably, John sent a letter to me via my brand new employers addressed to ‘Dick (trading as Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy’ Jones’.
The last time we bumped into each other was at a May Ball at an Oxford college. I was then playing bass with an altogether more down-to-earth blues band & he was the very high-profile star DJ. To the sound of Wet Wet Wet hammering their way through an interminable soundcheck, we wandered around the perimeter of the site. Everywhere scions of the finest families of the land were prostrated, either sexually active or asleep in their own vomit. In those dry, laconic, sorely missed tones, John drawled, “There is much to be said for having managed to avoid a university education”.
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You simply have to track down & listen to John Wayne Casey Jr. by Sufjan Stevens as soon as possible. Maybe it would never have got
written & recorded had U2 never convened in that Dublin youth club 30 years ago, but both singer & song have an authentic magic all of their own.
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On Monday my old pal Geoff Deering comes visiting. English to the core, he has lived in Surrey, BC, for the past 20-odd years. We were at school together nearly 50 years ago & we’ve stayed in touch ever since. I don’t have a wide circle of close friends but Geoff is a fixture.
11:00:08 PM 
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