Q&A with John Peel

Interview, London, 6 March 1985.

RH:   You were born in Birkenhead.

JP:   Well, in a place called Heswall, in fact, which is in the Wirral.  I think the people who live there would resent being told it was Birkenhead.  But I was just born there because that was where the hospital was.  I actually lived on the outskirts of a small village called Burton, overlooking the River Dee.  Jolly nice it was too!

RH:   I think you went to public school.  Is that right?

JP:   Yes, I did.  I was packed off to boarding school when I was seven just after the war and stayed there until I was thirteen and then went to Shrewsbury, where I served with singular lack of distinction and then went into the Army.

RH:   I can’t imagine you enjoying the discipline of school and the Army.

JP:   Well, funnily enough at the time it didn’t occur to you to question them.  I didn’t enjoy them, no, but at the same time you never thought to yourself these rules and these regulations are absurd so why should I keep to them?

I’d like to pretend that I was a great rebel, constantly getting into trouble and so on… Well, actually I did get into trouble, but mainly because of stupidity, not because of any rebellious streak.  There were just so many rules and regulations that guided almost everything that you did day or night, that, rather like being in the Army, it was impossible to get through twenty-four hours without transgressing them several times and it was just a question of whether you got caught or not and I usually did, because I was, as I say, rather thick and I used to get beaten an awful lot.

RH:   A lot of the heroes of rock, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Joe Strummer or whoever have had a drop-out image…

JP:   Well, they were mostly good middle-class boys, the Beatles rather less so, I think.  I suppose you could say that most of them were in a sense aspirant working class, if such a condition is possible.

Those people you cited, I really don’t pay much attention to them now, because I’m not a nostalgia man.

RH:   How did you come to go to America [in 1960] when you were only 21?

JP:   It sounds quite mad.  I went basically to avoid having a twenty-first birthday party. …  She [John Peel’s step-sister] had a very splendid party indeed [for her 21st], she’s only about five months older than I am.  So, I knew that my father, realising that I didn’t have any friends of my own - which sounds rather pathetic but is actually just a statement of fact and as I say certainly didn’t bother me at the time - was going to invite basically the same people to my party.

This was a thought which filled me with so much dread that when he said I’ll send you to America I did a quick bit of arithmetic and figured out that if I could hold on there for three months I should get past the hurdle of my twenty-first birthday.

RH:   Did you go on a boat or a plane in 1960?

JP:   I went on a boat, the SS Eugene Lykes, from Liverpool to Houston.  It took about two weeks trundling across the Atlantic and it was very pleasant actually.  There was nothing to do except eat and read which were two activities I rather enjoyed, so I did just that.

There were only four other passengers, I think - five other passengers.  A chap who’d been over to London for a heart operation and his wife and a woman with two children who was going to join her husband in California.  It was very pleasant and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Great sunsets you get.

RH:   How much did it cost to get to America in those days?

JP:   No idea.  My dad had fixed it up.  He was in the cotton business and he used to do a lot of business with the Lykes Line.  His principal interest came because I was quite clearly showing no aptitude for anything at all except for falling asleep in front of the television that he was prepared to try almost anything and sending me out of the country seemed like a pretty damn good idea to him.  So the expense must have seemed to him to have been money well spent.

RH:   You worked as a DJ in Dallas for seven years?

JP:   No, no, that’s not right.  I was in Dallas for seven years and I did my first radio programme in 1961 purely on the strength of having some LP s.  There was a rhythm-and-blues programme which all the kids listened to called Cats’ Caravan on station WRR from ten till twelve funnily enough five nights a week.

And I had some French LP s, at least the sleeve-notes were in French and I took them down to the station and because they were in French and they couldn’t read them they asked me to take them on the programme and just talk about them.

The people of Dallas mustn’t have been able to believe their ears because in those days I sounded like a minor member of the Royal Family.  I had one of those… terribly constricted sort of voices… could hardly get the words out.  People in Dallas must have thought this was wonderful.

So I did this for a while, I can’t remember how long now, six-eight weeks, just an hour every Monday.  And then I started asking them if they’d pay me and they rather resented this and told me to go away.  But I’d been bitten by the bug and hung around the radio stations until the Beatles thing started three years later and then got on the radio again on a different station as a Beatle expert although of course I knew sod all about the Beatles.

RH:   So what were you actually doing when you first got there?

JP:   I was an office boy.  When I first went over there I was supposed to be learning about the cotton industry, but the people my father sent me to see just employed me as cheap foreign labour really.

There was myself and a couple of black blokes and we used to work from about eight in the morning quite often until midnight, no overtime, but we thoroughly enjoyed it though, because after the other people had gone out of the office we used to get Country Club malt liquor and food and stuff and get slightly pissed and sing and listen to the radio and so had quite a good time.

And sometimes after I’d finished work I’d go down and listen to bands with them and so on.  I was conscious I was usually the only white person there but it didn’t really bother me much.  It was only when I met other white people and they said ‘where were you last night?’ and I said I went down on Hall Street to see Jimmy Reid or somebody and they used to think I was kidding them because they wouldn’t even have driven through there, you know.  And of course once people are telling you that you start getting scared yourself.

RH:   So it was all segregated at the time?

JP:   Oh, yes.  Very much so, yes.

RH:   And you shook hands with Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon on the same day in the 1960 presidential campaign…

JP:   I did, one of these things which nobody believes… In two days actually.  They had parades through Dallas in 1960 at the time they were all running for election and it was - who was it? - Nixon and Goldwater, I think?

RH:   Lodge.

JP:   Was it?  That’s right, Cabot Lodge - and the next day it was Kennedy and Johnson.  And because obviously at that time nobody had been assassinated, security wasn’t that strict and you got people running out and shaking hands with them, so I ran out and shook hands with them as well.

I had a chat with Kennedy.  It was one of those things, I don’t know whether it was ten seconds or a couple of minutes, I can’t remember very much about it to be honest. But I was aware of having a brief conversation with him, during which he talked about me, which was very gratifying, you know, because obviously most politicians talk about themselves.  But I’m not going to write The John F. Kennedy I Knew on the strength of it - but he seemed like quite a nice bloke from that brief encounter. 

RH:   Did you relate this to what happened afterwards when three of them in turn became President?

JP:   I could never remember.. I’m glad you reminded me it was Lodge, I’ve always been under the impression it was Humphrey or someone.  My grasp of American politics is fairly minimal as you can probably tell, but I was always hoping that whoever the fourth chap had been would become President as well, if only to make the story a better story.

Lodge, eh?  I must try and remember that.

RH:   Dallas has got this reputation as a frenziedly right-wing place with murders all the time…

JP:   The whole of America’s a frenziedly right-wing place, most of it anyway.  And increasingly so as far as I can tell viewed from behind a blast-wall here.  I live in that part of the country that is like the flight-deck for Aircraft-carrier Britain… I have no desire to go back, put it that way.

RH:   You were there at the time of the assassination in November 1963 and you got in to see Oswald’s press conference…

JP:   I did, yes.  Again, I just got in there on the strength of having an English accent really.  When I said I was from the Liverpool Echo they weren’t going to say, “Show us your papers, bub,” or whatever people say in movies.

So I just went down.  They just waved me through.  I had no camera or notebook or pen or anything.  I just wandered in like a tourist really.  When they brought Oswald in I was actually fairly close to the door, seven or eight feet away.  The district attorney, a white-haired chap, was making a speech over in the corner and they were snapping away and then Oswald was brought in and he said, “Here’s the fellow who’s been charged with the assassination of President Kennedy.”

He’d got a big bruise on his cheek at that time I remember and either he was a jolly good actor or he had no idea at all what was going on, because he certainly looked very bewildered by it all.  Didn’t look like the kind of chap who’d just shot a President.

RH:   Do you think it changed America?  Could you feel the mood changing as a result of it?

JP:   No.  I’m not that perceptive a bloke really.  It was just quite exciting, you just thought, “I’ve been present at an historic event” I didn’t stop and have serious talks with people about ‘Whither America?’

Most people in Dallas were fairly pleased ‘cos they didn’t like him.  He was unpopular in Texas because he kept threatening to do something about oil subsidies on which the state was by-and-large founded and a lot of extremely influential people had made a fortune out of these subsidies so he was not a popular man at all.

RH:   The next thing that happened after that was really the arrival of the Beatles in February 1964...

JP:   In America really everything that had happened over here in the space of a year-fifteen months was crammed into a few weeks, so that they had the top six records or six out of the top ten or something quite mad.  And just because I came from approximately the same part of the world I became a sort of surrogate Beatle which was rather wonderful in an awful way, because I used to get mobbed in downtown Dallas and girls wanted to go to bed with me on the strength of it.

And that for rather a lonely sort of bloke - or not lonely but just rather solitary and frustrated bloke - was like having all your masturbation fantasies come to life about you.  So for a few weeks it all seemed rather wonderful and then it became more and more dangerous because of the statutory rape legislation that they have in America, which means that if somebody over the age of eighteen, which I was, has any kind of sexual experience, I mean almost anything at all, except sort of hand-holding, counts as statutory rape with somebody under the age of eighteen.  And obviously most of the people who came to see me were under the age of eighteen.

So their parents started turning up from time to time and it got more and more hair-raising.  So, I eventually moved out of the place where I was living and went to live with a family and the mother and the father of the family died within a month of each other and the daughter and I got married.  It was the most bizarre thing.  One of these days you feel like you ought to write a play about it just so people can say, well that sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life.  Again, it was all really rather bizarre but sad at the same time, you know, because you thought well the idea of sleeping with somebody just because they come from the same part of the world as the Beatles is a little odd.

But of course, confronted with the opportunity, you didn’t say, “No, no, my dear, you must return to your hearth and home!”  You don’t think like that at that age.

RH:   Were you surprised British groups could make it in America?  Music had been dominated by Americans.  They’re not notoriously open-hearted towards foreigners.

JP:   No, they’re not and they seem to have reverted to type rather.  But when you first heard the first Beatles’ record which was, I think, ‘Love Me Do’, which I heard in a record shop when it was on VJ in America.  I used to go into the shop regularly and the fellow said, “Hey, this band is from Liverpool.  Isn’t that where you’re from?”  So, I said yes and he put it on.  It was so obviously better than anything else that was around at the time or was different from, because in Dallas there was always a big R&B thing and that was what most people listened to all the time and what I listened to all the time.  And it quite clearly wasn’t that and yet at the same time it had much of the excitement and primitive quality of the best of R&B.

And most of the other records that were in the charts at the time were awful things like Bobby Vinton records, you know, just muck.  So the Beatles came along as a very welcome change.

RH:   Do you think white music has colonised black music?

JP:   It’s always terribly fashionable to say this and all the letters in Black Echoes are always - usually written by white blokes you suspect - about how white culture has ripped off black music, and it quite clearly in a way has.

But then I remember that people were always saying to me at the end of the Sixties, “Eric Clapton - he’s a good guitar-player but of course he leads you to B. B. King.”  And I listened to B. B. King and I thought, well, actually I prefer Eric Clapton.  There is that kind of inverted snobbery involved.

RH:    The Vietnam War came up while you were in America, what kind of effect did that have?

JP:   Well, it seemed so far away.  Obviously there were mates of mine who got drafted and came back very different and rather disconcerting people.  One friend I had in San Bernardino came back describing with some relish how he’d shot his first “gook” and how he’d fired at this bloke and seen his head blow asunder.  But again, you’re aware of it going on and people being sucked into the draft, but as I’d done my military service in the British Army, which is obviously an allied army, I wasn’t liable to be drafted myself anyway and I was too busy with other stuff; in San Francisco and Berkeley and places they were having anti-Vietnam protests and so on, but in San Bernardino life carried on pretty much as before.

RH:   There’s a view of the Vietnam protests, the drug-culture and rock all emerging at the same period.

JP:   Well, I’m rather spoiling your story in a way.  But at the time you’re not conscious of it.  You don’t think, “Goodness me, a culture is evolving all about me!”

I was aware of going to see groups in Los Angeles like Beefheart and Love and Jefferson Airplane.  I went to the recording sessions for Surrealistic Pillow and I just thought it was rather boring sitting in the studio with a bunch of people who didn’t talk to you, listening to them doing the same track over and over again.

As I say, it wasn’t a transcendental experience at all.  There were just various things going on.  I was interested in other stuff as well.  I used to go motor-racing and things like this.  My radio job I enjoyed but you were just busy living life really and it’s only subsequently that you stamp a kind of pattern on it and then as I say people are vigorously rewriting history you rewrite your own past in your own image.

RH:   You came back to England in 1967 and worked in Radio London and then came here to Radio One.  What brought you back specifically?

JP:   I got into trouble with the police in California, the statutory rape thing again.  The police had wanted to close the radio station down for some time because there’d been a chap on there previously who’d had an appetite for twelve and thirteen year-old girls which clearly wasn’t entirely healthy.  And after he’d moved on they carried on the campaign against myself and the programme director who was Canadian and they got this girl who was in the Juvenile Hall to testify on tape, which was all she had to do, she wouldn’t have had to go into court or anything, that she’d given me a hand-job round the back of the radio station, which she hadn’t done, though that’s only of academic interest.

And so I had to leave really to avoid being put inside to await trial ‘cos I couldn’t have afforded to pay bail or anything, so I had to scarper.

RH:   You’ve worked for the BBC for eighteen years.  It’s got this reputation of being a very Establishment organisation…

JP:   Yes, Well, I’m as much a part of the Establishment as anybody else.  I have a very precise and clear function within that Establishment which is that of safety-valve.  So, I’m as much a functionary of the Establishment as anyone else in that people phone Radio One and say this is a load of crap, they say, “Ah, well, if you don’t like it there’s always John Peel.”

So, as I say, you’re an excuse for them.  It’s easy to see yourself rather romantically as the Baader-Meinhof Gang of British broadcasting, but it quite clearly is nothing like that at all.

RH:   Have you had much trouble with stuff you’ve wanted to play on the radio?

JP:   None at all really.  You have a kind of self-monitoring thing ’cos you know that if something’s called ‘Fuck Me’ or something like that, that you’re not going to get away with playing it, but you can get away with an awful lot of stuff.  There have been very very few records that I really wanted to play that I felt it would be injudicious to play.  I can’t think of any offhand although there must have been some.

What you have to fear really more than anything else is there is a class of person whose role in life seems to be that of finding things to be offended by.  They go to the theatre to be offended, or more accurately read about it in the papers and are offended by it, rather than actually going to witness what it is that’s happening.

And there is a class of person who will listen to the radio in order that they can hear something that they can complain about.  But I like to think that the programmes that I do would cause such offence to them as a matter of course that they wouldn’t listen to more than ten or fifteen minutes anyway, however devoted they are to this curious cause.

RH:   When you started playing punk records in 1977 was it an overnight conversion from playing Pink Floyd and the music of that generation?

JP:   It wasn’t exactly overnight but it was fairly rapid I must admit and I was genuinely surprised that other people didn’t go along with me.  I got a lot of irate letters from people who wanted me to go on playing the Grateful Dead, to really go on playing their record-collection, for the rest of their lives.  Which has always struck me as being fatuous.

I thought people would be genuinely excited and rather frightened by it all because there was this element of thinking, “Jesus, it’s alright to play these things on the radio, but what happens if they’re waiting for me outside?”  I quite liked all that really.

The audience changed quite dramatically.  The numbers stayed about the same, but according to the BBC’s researches, which I think are probably fairly unreliable, but the whole nature of the audience changed in the space of a couple of weeks, which again I found quite exciting, as the people who wanted to hear Grateful Dead records forever could do so in the privacy of their own communes.

The audience became seven or eight years younger and - is it demographics? - they became more working class as well.  I would imagine that it’s basically studenty people who listen.  I don’t know really.  I don’t know who listens.

RH:   Are you resentful of the people who make it as against those you’re playing?

JP:   No.  Not really.  I’m always concerned when people who do stuff that I like do ‘make it’ whatever ‘making it’ is.  Obviously for some people ‘making it’ is being on the radio whereas for others ‘making it’ is owning half California.

No, I don’t resent them at all.  I wish I had their money; I’d put it to more practical use.

Notoriety does seem to be a rather destructive factor.  Most of the people who’ve done stuff that I’ve liked who’ve become famous in any way most of them seem to have become complete dickheads.  Someone like Rod Stewart who is actually quite a nice bloke, although the tightest man I’ve ever met in my life, now seems to be a complete swine, which is a pity because he wasn’t like that.

I don’t know very many in showbiz anyway.  I see my role as being to stay on the terraces and just watch what goes on.  Even bands that I like -- I mean if I go up to the Fall and say, “Hey, fellas, I want to hang out with you!”  Very sensibly they’d tell me to piss off.

RH:   Do you believe in the idea of a sell-out bound up with the fact people can make a lot of money in this industry?

JP:   Not really.  People don’t make records in the hope that they’ll remain wilfully obscure.  They don’t issue them in the hope that no one will buy them.  The record industry is almost a definition of capitalism - I’m not a politician so I’m on rather shaky ground here - but the idea that people can set up in business for themselves and make a lot of money as a result seems to be almost exactly what the government want people to do and when people form bands that’s by-and-large what they’ve got at the back of their minds.

They may, at a time when they haven’t got any money, trot out all the ‘property is theft’ arguments, but it’s easy to say that when you haven’t got any property.  When you’ve got say a collection of LP s it usually turns out that property is theft except for your collection of LP s which is somehow excluded from the equation.

But at the same time there are obviously honest and honourable people who do stick to their principles, but don’t ask me to name any of them.

RH:   What do you think of rock journalism?

JP:   Well, I just read the gossip-columns and the reviews basically.  Four-page interviews with bass players tend to go unread.

RH:   Do you see the cutting of your programme to three days a week as a threat?

JP:   Well, it very nearly disappeared entirely, so three days a week seems a blessing in comparison.  I would have thought my days are probably numbered, but I’ve been thinking that for eighteen years.

It always sounds like terrible Bob Hope-style false modesty but I think that the fact that I win music paper polls and things consistently seems not so much a recommendation of me as an indictment of the rest of them.  That seems to be fairly obvious really.

The fact that you can go on winning these things for seventeen or eighteen years does seem to indicate that there’s something wrong with the system rather than there’s something dazzlingly right with me.  If I was that clever I would have risen up to Heaven in a fire of whatever it was.

RH:   What do you think about the role of women in rock?

JP:   I don’t know, never having been one.  Record companies send more women round because most of the producers are male and it does seem to work if somebody comes in and behaves in a coquettish manner.  We never get offered fast cars and faster women as inducements though.

Better company than blokes though.  I’ve always found that ever since I was at school, which was an all-boys school, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I kept myself to myself, because blokes en masse are such twerps.

It’s like if you go anywhere with the Radio One DJ s, it’s quite a transcendental experience.  That’d turn you to religion if nothing else would!

All they talk about is bums.  It’s quite extraordinary.  And I said this to Kid Jensen once and he refused to believe me.  I said that’s all they talk about, bums and dicks, and he said no, no, it’s not true.  So the next time we were all together we walked into the room and someone said, “Hello, Kid, glad you could make it to the match,” and he said, “Yeah, I can’t wait to see yours in the shower!”  And I just tapped him on the shoulder and said, “What did I say to you the other day?”

He had the decency to admit that I was right.  Most peculiar.  Blokes always do that though, every time I’ve played in any kind of charity football team or anything like that.

I’m not saying they should sit and talk about Flemish poetry or whatever, because I don’t know anything about Flemish poetry.  I know more about dicks than I do about Flemish poetry, but on the other hand I don’t want to talk about them.

There you go, that’s a good way to go out!