Perfumed Garden

''This article is about the the late night pirate radio hosted by Peel on Radio London in the 1967. For the blog focused on Peel sessions, see'' Perfumed Garden (blog).

Peel Remembers
(from Radio Radio, 1986)

Early in 1967 – I was married at the time to an American girl, and it was a fairly catastrophic marriage, so I decided to get out of the area to the extent of coming back to Britain. And went to live with my mother in Notting Hill. And obviously I had no work, and no expectation of work. And a fellow who was living next to her at the time had dealings with Radio London, the pirate ship, and he said why didn’t I go along and see Alan Kean, who was running the station from the offices in Curzon Street. So I went along. Fortunately, they didn’t ask me to audition. I just said I’d been working on the radio in California and they were sufficiently impressed by this to give me a job. And I was very pleased to get it, because as I said, my marriage was in tatters already and the idea of being on a ship for two weeks out of three seemed to be terribly appealing, because it meant I was away from domestic strife.

So I went out there, and as junior member of the team, I had to do two programmes. I had to do a daytime programme, which was just the regular Radio London fare, you know. They used to play a lot of new records – more new records and more artfully chosen new records. I mean, they weren’t bought on, unlike Caroline. But I also had to do a late night programme, from 12 until 2. And initially I used to just do this as I had done the other programme. I mean, run all the commercials and do the weather and the news and all of the things that I was supposed to do.

Gradually it dawned on me that no one was actually listening to this programme – I mean, no one in the Radio London office, and certainly none of the people on the ship. So I started to improvise a little bit and gradually stopped running the ads and so on, and playing more of this music that I had brought back from America with me. And also adding a British dimension with people like the Incredible String Band and Hendrix and Pink Floyd, I suppose, Tyrannosaurus Rex, all these sort of people. I called the programme the Perfumed Garden.

And by the time I got round to calling it the Perfumed Garden, I’d entirely dispensed with the format and I was reading people’s poetry – extraordinarily badly – and people were writing poetry and sending it in to me. And it was the Summer Of Love, you know, and it became compulsive listening to anyone who was into that. And this was all over northern Europe. In fact, I still encounter people in Holland when I go over there, who go, “Ah yeah, we remember very well, we remember the Perfumed Garden, a big one!” You know, which is quite nice that they still recall all of that.

And the first inkling I think that Alan Kean had that this was going on was when, or so legend has it, when Brian Epstein phoned him up to congratulate him on having had the foresight to have put such a programme out. And of course he listened to it and was horrified. But by this time Radio London only had a few months to run anyway, so they decided they may as well leave things as they were.

Links

 * Wikipedia: Perfumed Garden
 * Wikipedia: Radio London
 * Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame
 * Radio London: Peel press clippings index Includes Perfumed Garden columns for International Times
 * Radio London: Big L Fab 40 Charts Index