mardi 26 octobre 2004

Death of John Peel... Good memories... not sad ones I've changed tonight's blog in the past hour as I listened first to the BBC News obituary announcement followed by the Front Row appreciation on the life and times of English DJ John Peel who died suddenly of a heart attack earlier today whilst on holiday in Peru. Back in 1967, as a raw production designer for Granada Television in Manchester, my first job was an on-location pop show with John Peel and T-Rex. I can't remember many of the details about the show and supporting cast (they say if you can remember the 60s you weren't really there) but some odd details were etched on my memory such as John Peel's vegan regimen at the time. I liked his attitudes, his voice... which I heard for the last time two Saturday mornings ago on his regular Radio 4 slot... and some of his music choice. He certainly influenced me to buy T-Rex music and probably influenced me to buy other more diverse artists and bands such as Country Joe & The Fish and Stomu Yamashta... rather than The Beatles and Rolling Stones. I remember his vegan regime because he wore no animal by-products... canvas plimsols were his "natural" footwear. He may also have converted me to Macrobiotics a few years later... however, after a year of brown rice and little else I reverted to a less severe vegetarian diet which I still live by. Although these are incidental and personal memories of John Peel I would like to express them simply because he was such a great, yet ordinary, sort of bloke. The gig he hosted for Granada TV was at the Alma Lodge, a night-club between Manchester and Stockport... and I had a budget of about £25 for "set decoration" spent, I think, on a few blocks of expanded polystyrene which were shaped into a trendy recliner by the prop's boys. He must have said something like, "You won't see me dead on that bloody monstrosity!" because all the photos I took show him in an old Smokers Bow chair which he probably found somewhere in the club. It was also my first meeting and illicit photo session with Marc Bolan and T-Rex... and unfortunately I was the rota photographer called out at dawn on Friday 16th September 1977 by the "London Evening Standard" newspaper to photograph the wreck of the Mini in which he had died that night... a bad month just four weeks after Elvis Presley went. I've included images here of John Peel and Marc Bolan... although they're not very good quality they do bring back good memories for me and remind me of other great times in the 60s... yeh, I do remember most of them as I wasn't that stoned!... times with my very young children who eventually emigrated to the USA and Canada, and other friends around that same period who went different ways never to be met again. The important thing to me is that I have all of these experiences recorded... thousands of contact sheets of them to browse through... photographers are very fortunate to have these visual diaries in such transient times. 9:51:17 PM    comment []