I am sure the preceding statement is one that many, many people all over the UK can identify with readily enough, judging by the outpouring of grief upon news of the DJ’s demise. Musicians from every sonic genre paid glowing, devastated tribute to the man who helped launch a thousand musical careers with his radio shows, and every true hardcore music fan in the British Isles felt a small part of their youth die with the man. As a friend of mine, Andrew Gardner put it: “Hearing that Peelie was dead was like losing a loved one.” And how right he was. He also told me that somebody had hung a banner reading ‘JOHN PEEL RIP’ from a flyover on the road to Glasgow when news of his passing got out. And it’s a very, very rare celebrity indeed who can command that level of public love and devotion and mourning in their wake.

My own love of John Peel’s warm, funny, stylish, idiosyncratic hyper-enthusiastic uber-music-fan oeuvre started when I was 15, 16, back in 1985. I was a budding indie kid and would tune into Radio One and listen breathlessly to whatever strange, crazed mix of music Peel would play, picking out tunes here and there from weird bands to follow up on. Back then music was, for me, exciting and new and unexplored, and having somebody like Peelie guide you through the vast confusing modern music minefield was a gift.

He could play you songs by bands you could never hear anywhere else and you could swap new bands like playing cards at school the next day, excitedly debating the merits of Shop Assistants (one Edinburgh band I loved whom I discovered through Peel) over Green on Red over Butthole Surfers over Half Man Half Biscuit over The Jesus And Marychain over Uncle Slam over Napalm Death over...well, the list could literally go on forever, the man’s tastes were so eclectic and all-encompassing, as any listener of his could tell you.

I would sit by my stereo listening to Peel on weeknights and wait for new songs to come on I liked the sound of and tape them within seconds, recording the name of the artist at the end so I knew who I was listening to and could go into Sleeves Records in Falkirk (now sadly defunct) and buy their records. And listening to the whole show to tape songs from the famous Peel Sessions by bands like Big Black was always fun, leaping up to set the press the ‘pause’ button whenever the featured band’s name was mentioned. Great stuff indeed.

I remember writing a few band names on the desk of my maths class in fourth year and having a back-and-forth bit of banter with somebody I never met because they knew I listened to John Peel because of the bands I mentioned. And that was the thing. Back in those primordial pre-internet daze (he said, stroking his sage-like gray beard) his show was THE place to hear good new music, at least to me, a shy, hardly-musically-knowledgeable Falkirk kid, anyway.

And I even got my own name mentioned one time by the great man. In 1997 I drove Arab Strap on tour round the UK. The support band was Macrocosmica, who included at that point amongst their members Brendan O’Hare, ex of Mogwai and Teenage Fanclub. This super-energetic, incorrigible musical madman was running round on that tour with a dictaphone taping random soundbites, and I jokingly did a rap-rant by Rudy Ray Moore (as his infamous character Dolemite), the 70s blaxploitation movie star/adult comedian for Brendan. The band recorded a Session in London for Peel and Brendan used my Dolemite quote (along with random quotes from other people) at the start of the first song, which I still have on tape. Peelie’s unmistakable dulcet tones announced the band members and “Graham Falkirk, dictaphone and rapper, it says here” before the Session kicked off. I hadn’t expected it at the time and it totally blew me away. It’s a lovely moment, and one made even more poignant for me by Peel’s death.

It’s funny. I never truly fully acknowledged it, but I never did lose my love of and respect for John Peel, even as I grew older and away from my teenage years. I used to chuckle when I heard his voice doing a voiceover for, say, Club biscuits, and I occasionally toyed with writing him notes at Radio One repeating his current product-pushing mantra for a laugh, but I never quite got round to it.

But Peelie was always there, either on telly or on radio, in one form or another, and every time I saw or heard him it was like meeting an old friend again you hadn’t met in a while but whom you still had a great deal of affection for and wanted to know how they were getting on. Whilst my own love of music has somewhat waned as I have gotten older, Peel, quite rightly labelled the quintessential eternal teenager, never lost his enthusiasm for bands most people would never have even listened to, let alone given valuable airtime to, and his patronage was invaluable for generation after generation of young, grateful bands.

And that was the thing with Peel. You knew he wasn’t fake or in it for the fame or money, you knew he was a super-obsessed music FAN first and foremost forever, and you knew that he would never lie to you about music or try to palm you off with substandard sonic rubbish, because he simply would never sell himself or the fans out. He was a man in the grip of a lifelong musical love affair (says a man currently head-banging to the first Marychain album which I put on cos it came out when I was a teenage Peel listener), enraptured by popular and unpopular and mainstream and esoteric music in all its million myriad ways and shapes and forms. John Peel was a man you could TRUST for the straight musical scoop, and that was it. The End.

You would occasionally see him on telly at, say, Glastonbury, decades older than the other presenters, always looking somewhat bemused, with that lovely warm soft personality vibe he exuded, and he had a million miles more personal style and grace and integrity than any poor presenter opposite him. They just couldn’t compete with the man and knew it, conceding defeat to his innate superiority and his matchless music-lover credentials. Peel wiped out all comers without even trying, he was that good. And his millions of fans always knew it.

And so to his death. I read about it on the Guardian site by a fluke, just zipping around the net randomly. I sat stunned for a few seconds, feeling like somebody had gut-punched me...and then the tears came unrehearsed and unexpected, and it was weird that somebody whose work I had not truly paid attention to in years could have such a deep, profound effect on me. I had never thought all that much about the effect the man’s radio work had had on me, but hearing of his passing just made concrete and explicit how much that period of time and his benevolent musical guidance and love meant to a shy teenage me.

And as John Peel especially knew, there is a part of you that forever remains a nervous excited shy delighted hormonally driven-to-distraction teenager. When I heard that he wants the lyrics from his favourite song, Teenage Kicks by The Undertones, on his tombstone, “Teenage dreams so hard to beat,” I nodded and smiled in total empathetic approval, inspired by the ceaseless lifelong fury and fire of Peelie’s dedication in bringing the sonic word to the true believers. I will miss him, and be indebted to him, for the rest of my life, and so will countless others, for the way he changed our musical tastes, and thus to a degree our lives, forever.

Graham Rae is a 35-year-old Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and is halfway through his first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 17 years, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his rambles/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.