52 Facts About John Peel

John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey and radio presenter.

John Peel was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004.

John Peel is widely acknowledged for promoting artists of multiple genres, including pop, dub reggae, punk rock and post-punk, electronic music and dance music, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip hop.

John Peel appeared on television occasionally as one of the presenters of Top of the Pops in the 1980s, and provided voice-over commentary for a number of BBC programmes.

John Peel became popular with the audience of BBC Radio 4 for his Home Truths programme, which ran from the 1990s, featuring unusual stories from listeners' domestic lives.

John Peel was born in Heswall Nursing Home in Heswall on the Wirral Peninsula, near Liverpool, the eldest of three sons of Robert Leslie Ravenscroft, a successful cotton merchant, and his wife Joan Mary.

John Peel was educated as a boarder at Shrewsbury School, where one of his contemporaries was future Monty Python member Michael Palin.

John Peel was an avid radio listener and record collector from an early age, beginning with music offered by the American Forces Network and Radio Luxembourg.

John Peel recalled an early desire to host a radio programme of his own "so that I could play music that I heard and wanted others to hear".

John Peel completed his national service in 1959 in the Royal Artillery as a B2 radar operator.

In 1960, aged 21, John Peel went to the United States to work for a cotton producer who had business dealings with his father.

John Peel took a number of other jobs afterwards, including working as a travelling insurance salesman.

John Peel later worked for KOMA in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, until 1965, when he moved to KMEN in San Bernardino, California, and used his birth name, John Ravenscroft, to present the breakfast show.

John Peel returned to the UK in early 1967 and found work with the offshore pirate radio station Radio London.

John Peel was offered the midnight-to-two shift, which gradually developed into a programme, The Perfumed Garden.

Some thought it was named after an erotic book that was famous at the time, though John Peel claimed never to have read it.

John Peel's show was an outlet for the music of the UK underground scene.

John Peel played classic blues, folk music and psychedelic rock, with an emphasis on the new music emerging from Los Angeles and San Francisco.

When Radio London closed on 14 August 1967, John Peel joined the BBC's new music station, BBC Radio 1, which began broadcasting on 30 September 1967.

John Peel said he felt he was hired because the BBC "had no real idea what they were doing so they had to take people off the pirate ships because there wasn't anybody else".

John Peel presented a programme called Top Gear; at first he was obliged to share presentation duties with other DJs, but in February 1968 he was given sole charge of Top Gear.

John Peel presented the show until it ended in 1975.

John Peel played an eclectic mix of the music that caught his attention, which he would continue to do throughout his career.

John Peel was an occasional presenter of Top of the Pops on BBC1 from the late 1960s until the 1990s, and in particular from 1982 to 1987 when he appeared regularly.

John Peel often presented the BBC's television coverage of music events, notably the Glastonbury Festival.

Between 1995 and 1997, John Peel presented Offspring, a show about children, on BBC Radio 4.

When he took on the job presenting the programme, which was about everyday life in British families, John Peel requested that it be free from celebrities, as he found real-life stories more entertaining.

John Peel made regular contributions to BBC Two's humorous look at the irritations of modern life Grumpy Old Men.

John Peel appeared as a celebrity guest on a number of TV shows, including This Is Your Life, Travels With My Camera and Going Home, and presented the 1997 Channel 4 series Classic Trains.

John Peel was in demand as a voice-over artist for television documentaries, such as BBC One's A Life of Grime.

John Peel wore Liverpool football colours and walked down the aisle to the song "You'll Never Walk Alone".

John Peel claimed that, in the early 1960s, the only available women were in high school.

John Peel died suddenly at the age of 65 from a heart attack on 25 October 2004, on a working holiday in the city of Cusco in Peru.

On his Home Truths BBC radio show, John Peel once commented about his own death:.

John Peel's coffin was carried out to the accompaniment of his favourite song, The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks".

John Peel had written that, apart from his name, all he wanted on his gravestone were the words, "Teenage dreams, so hard to beat", from the lyrics of "Teenage Kicks".

John Peel was buried in the graveyard of St Andrew's Church in Great Finborough, Suffolk.

John Peel Sessions were a feature of his BBC Radio 1 shows, which usually consisted of four pieces of music pre-recorded at the BBC's studios.

Many classic John Peel Sessions have been released on record, particularly by the Strange Fruit label.

In 1991, the broadcast of the chart was cancelled due to a lack of votes, although many have speculated that it was because no entries came from the dance acts that John Peel had been championing that year.

The 1997 chart was initially cancelled due to the lack of air-time John Peel had been allocated for the period, but enough "spontaneous" votes were received over the phone that a Festive Thirty-One was compiled and broadcast.

In 1969, Peel founded Dandelion Records so that he could release the debut album by Bridget St John, which he produced.

John Peel appeared on one Dandelion release: the David Bedford album Nurses Song with Elephants, recorded at the Marquee Studios, as part of a group playing twenty-seven plastic pipe twirlers on the track "Some Bright Stars for Queen's College".

John Peel is sometimes confused with the more prolific record producer Jonathan Peel, who was an in-house music producer for EMI before going freelance in 1970.

John Peel wrote in his autobiography, Margrave of the Marshes, that the band of which he owned the most records was The Fall.

John Peel kept in contact with many of the artists he championed but only met Smith on two, apparently awkward, occasions.

John Peel described Lianne Hall as one of the great English voices.

John Peel listed Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica as his number 1, having previously described it as "a work of art".

John Peel was awarded many honorary degrees including an MA from the University of East Anglia, doctorates, various degrees and a fellowship of Liverpool John Moores University.

John Peel was appointed an OBE in 1998, for his services to British music.

In 2002, the BBC conducted a vote to discover the 100 Greatest Britons of all time, in which John Peel was voted 43rd.

On 13 October 2005, the first "John Peel Day" was held to mark the anniversary of his last show.