Favourite John Peel quotes

JP: Ah well, Hello, are you in a band?
CG: Yes
JP: How Lovely...

".. and here comes the good bit..."

"You would meet people who you would assume were complete knobheads who actually turned out to be quite nice. Sometimes it worked the other way as well!"

"And now for something by the appallingly titled Tasty Bush"

Like Dan Hartman: "We had an extremely pleasant conversation about toll-roads in New England."

"Straight in at the all-important No.39 spot..."

"At 27 it's Meatloaf - Hear him and weep" (instead of 'Read Em and Weep')

"At 26 it's the Sisters of Mercy with Thompson Twins" (instead of the Thompson Twins with Sister of Mercy)

(after playing the Smiths' Stretch Out and Wait for the first time, with it's lyric 'And is there any point ever having children?')

"I wondered about that long and hard, but in the end I decided there's always a chance that they'll be the ones that make the world a better place"

"coming up after this are the highlights of the Pearl Jam concert at [wherever].....which should last about 5 minutes I reckon"

'they love their mummies..... with a white wine sauce'

that sort of humour you couldnt script.

RIP John and thanks for the memories.

I`ve been digging out the old tapes and will put a few up soon.these are some of the best tributes I`ve come across.Keep it up.

"If you're so clever, why are you on your own tonight. How many times have I said that to you....?"

RIP and thanks John

Peel said "Why do ppl assume that if you don't love something then you must hate it? Why don't they realise that there are stages in between, like....indifference?"

"The best thing i like about your band, is i can't tell who you've been listening to..."

What a quote from the man who listens to everything!

“It’s quite humbling at Festive 50 time to know you’re broadcasting to the entire nation. I don’t know why Radios 2,3,4 & 5 even bother putting out programmes at this time.”

“I was just thinking that there’s probably no-one – apart from The Pig – who’s given me more pleasure than Mark E. Smith”

More than anything though was his ability in common with the great broadcasters that you were in the presence of a friend. I have loads of his remarks saved to tape. I’ll try and dig some out. One classic is football related and I don’t want to quote it incorrectly but it’s a peach.

Also he always seemed genuinely surprised when it all started going wrong, wrong track, wrong speed, not starting. I loved it when he would make the producer come in to confirm that he was pressing the right button or that his equipment ws wilfully showing the wrong track or information. We’ll all miss him.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/s.bending/

1 (After a couple of seconds silence following an extremely long-winded end to a Sisters of Mercy track ('Emma' for the nerds) "....one of the longest fade-outs in the history of recorded music". Actually. I think he introduced it with "this is the first time a Hot Chocolate track has made it into the festive fifty..."

2 After fearsomely anti-war 'The Green Fields of France' by the Men they couldn't Hang. "I think it's the barely suppressed emotion that makes it such a good song"

Am I the only one who loved him more for who he was than for his musical taste?

I listened to Peelie a lot in the 80s and then stopped but he always had a special place in my heart as the anti-DJ DJ. I thought he played an enormous amount of rubbish but I knew he cared. He was the only one who even tried to break the rules and open things up.

Andrew

It's been wonderful reading it, and recalling hearing some of these quotes live on Peel's show more than a decade ago, and even more wonderful that people are quoting them exactly word-for-word! (I think the one about "raining kisses on their eager upturned faces" was about Bolt-thrower, incidentally. And the full retort to Janice Long admitting to having David Cassidy on her wall was, "That would seem to indicate a degree of dexterity i never thought you were capable of Janice, I must say" - which rendered his TOTP co-presenter incapacitated for the chart rundown that followed!)

I remember from the 80s him playing 'I Was A Teenage Armchair Honved Fan' from one of his greatest gifts to us all, Half Man Half Biscuit, and he confessed, "We all were in our house!" And then more recently about the same band: "In our house our bosoms swell with love for them".

Does anyone else remember his brief flirtation with old yodelling records in the late 80s? They were fantastically entertaining, and after one such gem he murmured, "Not a dry eye in the house I'll warrant".

Living now in Rotterdam I used to listen to, and of course tape, his twice-weekly half-hour World Service shows, from which...

"That's Laura Cantrell, and I listen to her records so much I feel like a sort of stalker in a way..."

On 'Lottery Winners on Acid' by the Crimea:
"That could go on for another three-quarters of an hour, as far as I'm concerned..."

Don't let this stop. Someone somewhere must be working on tribute compilation CDs with his intros included, surely?

The programme that was on BBC4 at midnight, featuring archive footage of Peel faves in session for the BBC was aces as well. I wish Peel didn't have to be dead to get a programme featuring live music by the Bonzo Dog DooDah Band, Billy Bragg, Half Man Half Biscuit and the Fall on telly.

We were also wondering if the Undertones are secretly rubbing their hands in glee at the royalties flowing in from the liberal usage of Teenage Kicks as a byword for Peel at the moment. They played it at half-time at the Celtic match last week, FFS!?!?

bit in observer at the weekend about the autobiography and suggesting sheila could finish it (the precedent for this being the John Shaw book earlier in the year) but from the numbers it looked like it might end up being 1/3 peel and 2/3s sheila. 1.6 million pound advance(?) for the book too, would hurt like hell to have to pay that back on top of everything else. and there's an unauthorised biography planned too.

the peel / datsuns thing on bbc website is a great little interview btw. and the Lock Up tribute show was great too, lots of punk and ska.

> "I told you I was sick"

not funny and not true. reports are that he was feeling fine right up until the attack.

During the mid-90s, when he was on late on Saturday afternoons, he passionately read out a snippet from a fanzine where the band (from Australia/New Zealand?) had told the interviewer all about Peelie. 'He was a pirate DJ and brought down the government', possibly connecting him with the Sex Pistols sailing down the Thames along the way and making him to be about 80.

That's one thing I would love to hear again. And how I wish he had made it well into his 80s...

Go to BBC & vote the undertones for the festive 50.

My abiding memory of JP is not the time I actualy met him but Reading 1977 when having played a track at the wrong speed he said "ah well it's your last chance to annoy the neighbours & we all chanted "John Peel's a C**t"

As my Dad is now in Sumatra I'll tell his story - my half brother was in school with JP's son & when my dad met Mr. Ravenscroft (who he recognised) he said what do you do for a living & JP replied "I'm John Peel" my Dad said "yes but what do you do?" wound JP up but he later said it reminded him where he stood.
I met JP once in Batisford & he was so kind it didn't feel like hero worship.

why's he wearing two watches in that one picture? i'm sure i remember him explaining it before but can't quite recall the reason.

"No three things go quite as well together as a Trio" 8)