Night Ride

Night Ride was the name given in 1967 by the BBC to the show which went out nightly, between 12 midnight and closedown at 2 a.m,.on the combined frequencies of Radio One and Radio Two. It was an easy listening show designed for night shift workers and insomniacs, with "non-needletime" music and DJs drawn from Radio Two's presenters; they included Robin Boyle, Bruce Wyndham, Ray Moore and Jon Curle.

Then, in March 1968, a radically different Night Ride appeared on Wednesday nights, with the first hour presented by John Peel. According to Ken Garner's The Peel Sessions, the show had grown out of an original idea by producer John Muir for a programme of folk music, poetry and world music drawn from the extensive holdings of the BBC Archives. Muir met Peel's manager Clive Selwood, who told him that his client's future on Top Gear was still uncertain: Muir suggested that Peel do a pilot show, Peel did so and it was submitted to station controller Robin Scott, who described it as "a Perfumed Garden type show, which I am considering for a late night slot". As Radio One closed down at teatime and Radio Three - at the time a bastion of traditional and modern "high culture" - was still hostile to anything resembling "pop", the only late-night slot available on the BBC was on Night Ride.

Peel's Night Ride contrasted with his other BBC show, Top Gear, in its concentration on the more esoteric and "minority" aspects of the late 1960s underground culture. While most 1967-69 Top Gear sessions were by pop or rock bands and singers, Night Ride often focused on the acoustic music emerging from the more contemporary end of the folk scene. Each programme also featured a guest poet reading his or her work, BBC archive tracks of rare music from around the world, and various studio guests. Peel had mentioned, in his International Times column, the need for compromise in his work for the BBC, at one stage advising his listeners, who had hoped for a show resembling the Perfumed Garden, to "be patient". Night Ride seemed at first to be a continuation of the Perfumed Garden; the first record on the first programme was by PG favourites The Misunderstood, and the session guests were the Incredible String Band, whose music he had also featured heavily on his Radio London late-night show. Yet Night Ride differed from the Perfumed Garden in several respects: it was a "non-needletime" show, so Peel had little chance to play his favourite records; it was only 55 minutes long, so there was no time to read out long passages from listeners' letters; and instead of being alone in the studio he was obliged to interview, often somewhat awkwardly, a succession of studio guests. The programme also reflected the change from the dreamy, post-Sergeant Pepper idealism of summer 1967 to the more turbulent and confrontational mood of 1968. Although Peel himself remained the gentle hippy, some of his guests took a more activist stance - for example the poet Adrian Mitchell, who guested on the first programme and mentioned his involvement with anti-Vietnam War protests.

Predictably, audience response to Peel's Night Ride was mixed. While Peel's keen listeners were delighted, the audience who expected the familiar Night Ride format were sometimes horrified and made their feelings known. In his columns in International Times, Peel commented on some of the disapproving letters he received:


 * Following the first of the Wednesday night programmes, featuring the Incredible String Band and Adrian Mitchell, came a flood of angry and bewildered letters. Many of these were of the "I-fought-the-war-for-the-likes-of-you" variety and I was variously described as "effeminate", "ignorant", "gushing" and "communist"......(IT 28, p.11)


 * There have been some amazing letters. "That John Peel has such a COMMON voice and the poets are so vulgar". "I've listened to all of your programmes and have hated everything you've ever played". "It sounded as though every record on Night Ride was played backwards". That last was signed "A Nightwatchman, Bermondsey" which was almost too good to be true. It is all involvement of a sort though, I suppose, and preferable to lying around snapping the fingers and saying "Wow, groovy, man" to each and every record indiscriminately. (IT 37, p.12)

In the same IT column Peel claims that


 * The whole point of Thursday morning's "Night Ride" has been to play and do so many different and, hopefully, good things that the casual listener, having made the initial choice between listening and turning off, cannot help but be touched by some part of the programme. This does seem to be working as the listening figures crawl upwards. (IT 37, p.12)

There were others at the BBC who supported him in this aim, and the programme did win some significant critical approval, George Melly and the poet and radio producer George MacBeth both praising the attempt of Peel and his producers to break down the barriers between "pop" and "culture" in the traditional sense of the word. This was long before "crossover" had become a familiar concept in the music industry, but it reflected how artists like the Beatles, and their more adventurous listeners, were developing an interest in a much wider variety of music than radio programmes usually acknowledged. Peel featured folk, blues, rock and pop alongside the archive tracks which became a staple of the programme, and also classical or "serious" music, from Scarlatti and Pachelbel to Messaien, Penderecki and Terry Riley.

Another unique aspect of Peel's Night Ride was the weekly reading by a guest poet. This too followed on from the Perfumed Garden, which had featured both the Incredible New Liverpool Scene LP, with the poetry of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Mike Evans, and Peel himself reading the work of the Liverpool poets as well as poems sent in by his listeners. Poetry had been an important influence in the development of the British underground since the famous Albert Hall poetry concert in 1965, which was a surprise sell-out and has been seen as its first major gathering. The poets who appeared on Night Ride were mostly young, non-establishment figures, usually at a distance from the literary mainstream. Some, like Cream's lyricist Pete Brown, had connections with pop music, reflecting the widespread 1960s opinion that songwriters such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Donovan could be thought of as poets.

Night Ride lasted 18 months, from March 1968 to September 1969. In early 1969 Robin Scott, who is identified in Ken Garner's The Peel Sessions as the Radio One Controller most sympathetic to Peel, left the station. This was followed by Top Gear's producer Bernie Andrews' removal from the programme, which lost its Sunday afternoon prime time slot. At the same time, Night Ride was moved to Wednesday evenings at 8.15, placed in the middle of a sequence of "specialist" programmes audible on medium wave only. The show had not only divided the BBC's late night listening public but had courted controversy and thus displeased the more conservative elements in the BBC hierarchy. Not only did Peel seem to represent the drug-related hippy culture they loathed, but he expressed his support for many of the protest movements of 1968; the anti-Vietnam War movement, the student revolt, the rejection of militarism - as did many of his guests on Night Ride.

Three Night Rides proved particularly controversial. In November 1968 the satirist John Wells guested on the programme and criticised the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson for an alleged indifference to the suffering caused by the civil war in Nigeria (pictures of starving children in the rebel province of Biafra were at the time unavoidable, both in newspapers and on TV). Wilson, notoriously sensitive to media criticism, demanded an apology, which Peel was obliged to read out on the following programme. In December John Lennon and Yoko Ono appeared on Night Ride to be interviewed, to promote their album "Two Virgins" and to preview the forthcoming "Alchemical Wedding" happening/concert; there were complaints that the material they read out was "suggestive". Peel vigorously countered this argument in his IT column. Then, in May 1969, Peel admitted he had had VD, in the course of an interview with Tony van den Bergh of Radio 4, who was due to present a programme aimed at reducing the stigma associated with the subject. Peel's account of the behaviour of visitors to the VD clinic he attended was wry and amusing, but led to calls for his sacking from some voices in the popular press.

However, these incidents did not lead directly to the end of Night Ride; as Ken Garner points out in The Peel Sessions (p.52), the show was unpopular with management after Robin Scott's departure from Radio One and was "allowed to continue, under sentence of death, before being axed in September". While the traditional midnight to 2 a.m. Night Ride slot continued on Radios One and Two until the mid-1970s, with an increasing number of sessions from folk and acoustic artists, the format of a wide-ranging exploration of words and music (as the BBC had originally described Peel's Night Ride) was abandoned. Peel never again presented such an adventurous programme. A 1970 article in International Times on censorship in the BBC even suggested that he was now working under a "special contract", which forbade him from expressing his opinions on non-musical matters during his shows.

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