Poetry

....Having had poetry pounded into me brutally at the curious schools I attended I am only just finding out that poetry can be really enjoyed and appreciated. (Peel in his Perfumed Garden column, International Times, 8 March 1968)

Throughout his career, John Peel included poetry and spoken word material of various types among the records and sessions in his programmes.

In the 1960s, the connections between poetry and song were highlighted by the popularity of folk music, in particular traditional folk ballads, many of which had been discovered by collectors with a literary background, were later included in poetry anthologies, and served as a model for new songs. Contemporary, folk-influenced songwriters such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Leonard Cohen also published books of their own and their lyrics often owed more to poetry than to Tin Pan Alley pop song conventions. It became fashionable among critics to describe 1960s pop lyrics as poetry, and even during his time in the USA, Peel was aware of this, contributing a poem of his own to the Kmentertainer in late 1966.

After Peel returned to Britain, poetry was a feature of his Perfumed Garden programmes, on which he read poems by the Liverpool poets and others sent in by listeners, as well as playing tracks from the Incredible New Liverpool Scene LP and by artists such as Donovan, whom he considered a poet (although not all critics shared his high opinion of the singer's lyrics). When Peel joined Radio 1, some of his supporters in the BBC, including station controller Robin Scott and poet and radio producer George Macbeth, encouraged him to include poetry in his Night Ride programmes, with most shows featuring a poet reading his or her work live in the studio. Most of the poets who appeared on the show were regulars on the poetry-reading circuit which had developed in Britain during the 1960s, including Adrian Mitchell, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Pete Brown - and Ivor Cutler, who proved to be the most enduring Peel favourite to emerge from this era. Even Marc Bolan of Tyrannosaurus.Rex made an appearance as a poet on one 1969 "son of Night Ride" show, reading from his volume The Warlock of Love.

Night Ride ended in late 1969, but poetry and spoken word records or sessions didn't disappear entirely from Peel playlists, with further sessions from Adrian Henri, Ivor Cutler, and Vivian Stanshall, whose Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End tales, done as Peel sessions, were eventually made into a film. Then, in the wake of the punk revolution, a new wave of performance poets and spoken word artists emerged, among them John Cooper Clarke, Attila The Stockbroker, the "folk-punk" poet and songwriter Patrik Fitzgerald, and from the reggae scene, Linton Kwesi Johnson. Black Americans such as the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron pioneered a style which developed into hip-hop and rap, genres which also featured strong messages ans skilled wordplay.

Peel's programmes didn't just include poetry, but inspired another generation of poets, notably Simon Armitage and Ian McMillan, both of them Peel listeners. McMillan became a broadcaster, hosting Radio 3's The Verb, described as a "cabaret of the word" and more informal than previous poetry programmes on the network. It sometimes featured guest musicians such as Peter Blegvad, who had done Peel sessions in the 1970s as a member of Slapp Happy. But Peel himself seemed, in his later years, to become more conservative in his literary tastes and, like many people who wrote poems in their youth, seemed embarrassed by his earlier enthusiasm. Although he continued to play various kinds of music with interesting and sometimes poetic lyrics, after 1980 he seemed to show less of an interest in the kind of poetry he had encouraged on the Perfumed Garden and Night Ride.