John Peel passes away

John Peel OBE, legendary Radio 1 and Radio 4 presenter, has died suddenly on holiday in Peru.

It has been confirmed that John died from a heart attack last night - he leaves behind his wife Sheila and four children.

The veteran broadcaster had worked for Radio 1 since its launch in 1967.

Radio 1 Controller Andy Parfitt said:

"John Peel was a broadcasting legend. I am deeply saddened by his death as are all who work at Radio 1."

"John's influence has towered over the development of popular music for nearly four decades and his contribution to modern music and music culture is immeasurable."

"Hopeful bands all over the world sent their demo tapes to John knowing that he really cared. His commitment and passion for new music only grew stronger over the years."

"In fact, when I last saw him he was engaged in a lively debate with his fellow DJs over the state of new music today. He will be hugely missed."

BBC Director of Radio & Music Jenny Abramsky added:

"John Peel was a unique broadcaster whose influence on Radio 1 could be felt from its very first days. He nurtured musicians and listeners alike introducing them to new sounds."

"His open minded approach to music was mirrored by his equally generous approach to his audience when he went to Radio 4 to present Home Truths."

"He had a remarkable rapport with all his listeners. Everyone at BBC Radio is devasted by the news. John is simply irreplaceable. Our hearts go out to Sheila and his children."

Tributes have already started pouring in from artists and music fans around the world - we've got a place for you to add your own

We also have a messageboard where you can share your memories of John. For advice on how to cope with bereavement go to One Life's help pages. John Peel

John Peel Dead at 65

By Paul Cashmere

27 October 2004

John Peel, one of the world's greatest music radio DJ's, has died while holidaying in Peru. He was 65.

Peel was the BBC's longest serving radio presenter. He started at BBC1 in 1967 and was the first radio presenter to play New Wave and Punk.

The list of artists he introduced now reads like a who's who of classic rock. U2, Roxy Music, T-Rex, Rod Stewart, Blur, The Sex Pistols and T-Rex are some of acts who were first introduced to a UK audience via Peel's program. He was first in the UK to play Nirvana, White Stripes and the Velvet Underground.

Pulp was discovered by Peel. A young and unsigned Jarvis Cocker handed him a demo and he played it on his radio show. They were signed soon after.

The Smiths were another of his discoveries. Their first recording was a Peel session for the BBC. New Order were another band who recorded a Peel Session and later released the tapes on CD.

After announcing his death, the BBC played his favourite song 'Teenage Kicks' by The Undertones. They were another one of his favourite bands. Former lead singer Feargal Sharkey, who later became a successful solo act, went on the BBC today and said he was "single most important broadcaster we have ever known".

Peel is survived by his wife Sheila and four adult children.

'He was the most important person in British music since the birth of rock 'n' roll'

By Andy Kershaw

27 October 2004

It was like I had been hit by a hammer. Jenny Abramsky, the BBC's controller of network radio, called me and said: "I've got some bad news for you, and I think you ought to sit down." As soon as she said that, my mind just raced and in a flash, before she had said it, I thought "Peel's dead".

John had died of a heart attack, in Peru, aged 65. It was like being thumped. If I were a 16-year-old kid tonight in a band, dreaming of making it big, I would be thinking my chances were far less than they were yesterday. This is a huge cultural loss. John Peel was the most important figure in British music since the birth of rock'n'roll. Full stop. He is more important than any artist because he was the enthusiast who discovered so many of those whom we think of as the big figures of pop over the past 40 years.

Everyone was talking yesterday about how John was the only surviving member of the original Radio1 line-up. His legacy is far bigger than just having been a veteran DJ. It's not the longevity - it's what he did. He was forever championing bands and being ridiculed for being weird. Those bands became mainstream, from Pink Floyd to The Clash.

I consider myself lucky to have known him and to have been his friend. But I was also hugely fortunate, right at the start of my career, to have been put in an office with him and John Walters. What better education? What better comrades when you are starting out?

Since my early teens, John Peel had been my great musical influence. He shaped my tastes as a kid, giving me a breadth of enthusiasms. Then suddenly, blow me, I was sharing his 10ft by 10ft office space, having to sit on an upturned litter bin as there wasn't a third chair. It was the summer of 1985 and I had arrived at Radio 1 as a rather wild young thing. At first, I think Peel saw me as some kind of threat.

Once he realised I was a huge admirer and that we shared many of the same tastes, we became big pals. We had a lot in common. We enjoyed a breadth in music that covered everything from punk to country, reggae to African.

We used to go together to Stern's African record shop, just behind Broadcasting House in London, and buy piles and piles of records on spec. We'd come back to the office and have a wonderful afternoon finding out what we'd bought, like a couple of kids in the playground swapping bubble-gum cards - even though there was a 20-year age gap between us.

We would go to the TT races in the Isle of Man together. I remember John stood in the drizzle with an Eccles cake in one hand and a cup of red wine in the other. He was like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, stood behind a dry-stone wall in the corner of a field.

John was immensely good company. He was avuncular and protective. He was also the most natural broadcaster I have known and he taught me to talk to listeners as though you're talking to one person.

The last time I saw him he looked absolutely worn out. We went to a café near Radio 1 and I said: "John, you look terrible." He said: "They've moved me from 11pm to one at night and the combination of that and Home Truths (his Radio 4 show) is killing me." He felt he had been marginalised.

Since we heard the news, people have asked me: "What was John Peel like away from the microphone?" I'll tell you. He was exactly the same as he was when he was in front of it.

Short, fat, inept - and a hero for our times

The untimely death of John Peel has robbed the nation of one of its most influential moral and musical figureheads. Robert Hanks celebrates his extraordinary legacy

27 October 2004

The grief that many people will feel today about the death of John Peel has a personal dimension usually absent from the deaths of public figures. Though his eclecticism and devotion to beating the bounds of popular music - not to mention some cautious scheduling - meant that his Radio 1 show never attracted vast audiences, those who did listen loved him dearly.

A great deal has been said over the years, and will now be said again, about the bands he championed and his influence on the shape of popular music. Rather less has been said about what he would have been horrified to think of as his moral influence.

But over at least three decades he mattered to his listeners not only because of the records he played, but because of the way he talked between the records (it is important that for Peel it always was between records: it would have struck him as a gross discourtesy, to band and listener, to talk over the music).

He had a dry, slightly hesitant delivery, as if he half-expected any second to be pulled up and told off for talking nonsense.

He mocked himself constantly - for being short, fat and bald, for being unreasonably enthusiastic about Liverpool FC and The Fall, for supposed incompetence as disc jockey, husband and father. He seemed baffled that anybody would think he was worth listening to, and perpetually grateful. People who spent their adolescence tuned into Peel's Radio 1 show received an extensive education in modesty, kindness and gentle sarcasm, and learned that an appreciation of the music of rebellion and hate doesn't necessarily preclude grace of manner and tolerance: that being nice was kind of cool.

Or perhaps it worked the other way around: that only nice people were attracted by him in the first place.

The fact is, I have never met a regular John Peel Show listener I didn't like. (I was only ever an irregular myself.) His sly, undercutting wit allowed him to get away with things that in other DJs might have been rebarbative. He lent credibility, through his voiceovers, to dozens of so-so television documentaries and commercials (though it was reported that he wouldn't advertise any product he didn't use).

In later years, as a grateful nation showered honours on him - OBEs, Sony awards, the NME Godlike Genius award - he showed himself a sentimentalist of almost Dickensian proportions, bursting into tears at the drop of a statuette; but nobody minded.

His devotion to hearth and family, and particularly to his wife Sheila, "the Pig", was a running theme.

It was Sheila who, in 2001, insisted he have a blood test after years of feeling unwell, only for him to discover he had Type 2 diabetes. He had put down the classic signs of the disease - tiredness, a constant need to urinate and blurred vision, to ageing. He said that he was relieved at the diagnosis.

And, after years of being the music fan's friend, he found a new outlet for the more homely side of his nature in a Radio Times column in the early 1990s, John Peel's Family Album, in which he rambled amusingly about his four children, and the friendly contempt with which they treated him.

Although the column ran for several years, the Family Album tag was dropped - apparently at his children's behest - and he rambled amusingly about anything that caught his attention.

It was a logical progression from this to presenting Home Truths, the Radio 4 show in which ordinary people tell the nation the stories they usually save for the pub or the family. Peel had to link material that was sometimes banal, sometimes excruciatingly intimate.

Listening to him delivering his scripts, with a fluency strangely unlike his Radio 1 manner, it sounded as if some stopcock had been released, as if he had been waiting all his life to give free rein to his domestic side. For some fans, it seemed like a comedown - what was the man who discovered the Undertones and Pulp doing introducing an anecdote about parrots from Doris of Bexley Heath? But other fans, who had left him behind to discover the delights of domesticity on their own account, were delighted to encounter him again, and he gained a whole new fan base.

It is worth remembering all these people when Peel is referred to as a "cult" DJ. Take into account, too, the length of his career- people who started listening to him in their teens now have teenage grandchildren.

Now try to reckon up the numbers of listeners who will be mourning him today. Such widespread affection made him unsackable; but over the years, Radio 1 kept nibbling away at his slot.

Peel is gone, but his influence will live on - for, you hope, a very long time.

Tributes to a legend

Andy Parfitt

Radio 1 controller

John Peel was a broadcasting legend. I am deeply saddened by his death as are all who work at Radio 1. John's influence has towered over the development of popular music for nearly four decades and his contribution to modern music and music culture is immeasurable.

Jarvis Cocker

Pulp

It would be absolutely impossible to write a history of the past 40 years of British music without mentioning John Peel's name. He was one of those few people about whom you could truly say that the world would have been a much different place without him.

Feargal Sharkey

The Undertones

In the autumn of 1978, something happened that was to change my life forever; John Peel played "Teenage Kicks" on the radio for the very first time. Today, it just changed again, forever. We have just lost the single most important broadcaster we have ever known.

Jo Whiley

Radio 1 DJ

John was simply one of my favourite men in the whole world; as a music fan and presenter he was simply an inspiration.

Damon Albarn

Blur

John Peel's patronage was for me, like countless other musicians, one of the most significant things that happened to us in our careers. The world is going to be a poorer place with his sudden departure. I will miss him deeply. I want to send my heartfelt sympathy to his lovely family.

Gaz Coombes

Supergrass

I was fortunate enough to meet him and play a session at his home. I remember we had a great conversation about Elvis that day. He was the first to play our debut single "Caught By The Fuzz" on radio, which I know brought us to people's attention. He was a big influence to so many.

Alexei Sayle

Comedian

It was always great to listen to John. He was a crucial figure for music and he often thought that the BBC were trying to sideline him. The station went through various controllers who were not always keen on having an individual, distinctive voice, which John Peel was.

Bernard Sumner

Joy Division/New Order

If it wasn't for John Peel, there would be no Joy Division and no New Order. He was one of the few people to give bands that played alternative music a chance to get heard, and he continued to be a champion of cutting-edge music. Our thoughts are with his family.

Janice Long

Former Radio 1 DJ

I just can't believe it. You never thought John Peel was going to die. He made an incredible contribution to British music. When I arrived at Radio 1, he took me under his wing. He was totally passionate. He was passionate about football and music. More, he was passionate about his family.

Tommy Smith

Liverpool FC

He was an avid supporter, and was very passionate about football. I met him once and he talked about nothing else but the team. Liverpool people are proud people and we feel connected to those who go on to become famous. He will be missed.

Michael Eavis

Glastonbury founder

He was at Glastonbury as a kid in 1971. He had this incredible ability to pick bands that would succeed, and in a funny sort of way, he made them succeed. In 1983, The Smiths were his choice of band and nobody had heard of them. I went off to hear them and he was right

Elvis Costello

Singer/songwriter

Like many others, I felt I knew him from his voice on the radio. He was the contradiction of every bad thing you could say about the radio. He had an open mind about all types of music. He was a great man, a fabulous curmudgeon, and he was as rare as the music that he loved.

PEEL'S ALL-TIME FESTIVE 50

1 Joy Division, Atmosphere

2 The Undertones, Teenage Kicks

3 Joy Division, Love Will Tear Us Apart

4 Sex Pistols, Anarchy In The UK

5 The Clash, (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais

6 New Order, Blue Monday

7 The Smiths, How Soon Is Now?

8 Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit

9 The Smiths, There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

10 This Mortal Coil, Song To The Siren

11 Robert Wyatt, Shipbuilding

12 Pulp, Common People

13 Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Big Eyed Beans From Venus

14 Dead Kennedys, Holiday In Cambodia

15 Joy Division, New Dawn Fades

16 My Bloody Valentine, Soon

17 New Order, Ceremony

18 The Only Ones, Another Girl, Another Planet

19 New Order, Temptation

20 Joy Division, She's Lost Control

21 Wedding Present, Brassneck

22 The Smiths, This Charming Man

23 Sugarcubes, Birthday

24 The Fall, How I Wrote 'Elastic Man'

25 The Wedding Present, My Favourite Dress

26 Delgados, Pull The Wires From the Wall

27 My Bloody Valentine, You Made Me Realise

28 Joy Division, Transmission

29 Sex Pistols, Pretty Vacant

30 Pixies, Debaser

31 Belle & Sebastian, Lazy Line Painter Jane

32 New Order, True Faith

33 The Clash, Complete Control

34 The Fall, Totally Wired

35 The Jam, Going Underground

36 Stereolab, French Disko

37 Jimi Hendrix Experience, All Along The Watchtower

38 The Fall, The Classical

39 The Damned, New Rose

40 Tim Buckley, Song To The Siren

41 Beach Boys, God Only Knows

42 Velvet Underground, Heroin

43 Nick Drake, Northern Sky

44 Bob Dylan, Visions Of Johanna

45 The Beatles, I Am The Walrus

46 Beach Boys, Good Vibrations

47 The Sundays, Can't Be Sure

48 Culture, Lion Rock

49 P J Harvey, Sheela-na-gig

50 Pavement, Here