John Ravenscroft, aka John Peel, legendary Radio One DJ, is dead of a heart attack. Pirate radio DJ, punk patron and OBE, Peel, according to legend, was the first DJ to play a record twice in a row. Download mp3’s of recent Peel Sessions here.
Peel on Peel Sessions:
Over the years we’ve had almost everybody, except the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, of the kind of big bands of the past. More recently Oasis, I never really thought Oasis were much good to be honest, so they didn’t do one. Whereas Blur did a couple of times. My favourites would be fairly obscure things – the two sessions the Slits did during the punk era which were just magical, I thought, were just terrific. Oh, there have been so many. There have been so few that have been bad, it’s amazing, really, when you consider how many have been done. Many thousands now. Very few of them have been disappointing. The Clash did half one, and then amazingly said that the equipment in the studio wasn’t up to the standards that they’d expected so they couldn’t complete the session. Which seemed to me to be unbearably pretentious of them.