John Peel Show

"'John (Walters)'s going to be producing the late night programmes when they start next Monday....don't you forget to be there on Monday night at 11 o'clock on Radio 1 and on VHF for the new Who LP, 'Who By Numbers.''" (JP's final words on the last Top Gear show, 25 September 1975.)

Introduction

 * Top Gear had run for eight years before a revamp originally designed as a cost-saving exercise) saw it being dropped. Radio 1 merged with Radio 2 between 6-11 p.m. every night, and then the service returned for just one hour with a new Peel-presnted show until midnight. This programme is generally referred to as the 'John Peel Show', although the Radio Times merely listed it as 'John Peel' and JP himself called it either "the John Peel wingding", "my domestic programmes" (on overseas stations such as BFBS), or, most significantly, "Kat's Karavan". This was a programme (interestingly, broadcast on station WRR between 10 p.m.-12 a.m.) that he had become a fan of while working in Texas during the early 1960's, and on which he subsequently presented the second hour of that strand. (He was apparently sacked when he asked to be paid.) The style of the programme undoiubtedly influenced him: while the daytime stations were playing wall-to-wall pop, this show introduced him to the kind of material he wanted to play: blues records interspersed with comedy recordings.

1975-6: From Prog To Punk

 * With the control allowed him by an ostensibly open-ended format, the first six months of the programme's life followed the Top Gear diet of rock giants and session recordings from stalwarts such as Loudon Wainwright III with more off-centre helpings from the likes of Ivor Cutler and Viv Stanshall, whose 'Rawlinson End' saga occupied a whole week leading up to Christmas 1975. The new theme tune, rather than being one specially composed for the purpose, was an instrumental by the little-known Grinderswitch called Pickin' The Blues that would top and tail his programming for 17 years (and continue to appear on the World Service after that).
 * The event that changed the face of the show for good was the first play of a track by the Ramones, 'Judy Is A Punk', on 19 May 1976. Although the musical make-up of the programme did not immediately revolutionise, more and more of the first wave of punk began to find its way onto the show, and October and December featured the first sessions by the Vibrators and the Damned respectively, the latter being first broadcast as part of the first punk special (10 December 1976). With 'Anarchy In The U'K' already receiving regular airplay, it was clear that Peel's sympathies now lay in a different area, and the avergae listening age for his shows dropped dramatically.
 * The former listeners who had followed him from the Perfumed Garden through Top Gear and into the first year of his new show had one last hurrah, however. The 1976 Festive Fifty, an all-time favourites listener chart dreamed up in the autumn by Peel and Walters and which would become a staple of his December programming to the very end, featured only one track from the previous year - and no punk.

>work ongoing


 * Footnotes