World Music

The term "world music" has been used since the 1980s to describe various forms of music originating outside the Anglo-American pop mainstream, yet having an appeal to a segment of the worldwide popular music audience. In Britain, world music became an accepted definition following a meeting in London in 1987, which brought together a group of music industry figures who were seeking a more efficient way of marketing and selling records of music from various parts of the world. Some albums by artists from countries such as Bulgaria, Zimbabwe, Mali and Cuba were selling well and receiving airplay on radio shows such as those hosted by Charlie Gillett, Andy Kershaw and Peel himself, but non-Anglo-American music as a whole was difficult to market and to categorise. In response to this problem, the genre "World Music" was established, with its own charts, promotional networks and record shop browsing sections. The project was successful and nowadays World Music is a thriving niche market in the global entertainment industry.

"World Music" has sometimes been criticised as a definition so vague as to be meaningless, or as the expression of a "Western liberal cringe" which idealises exotic traditions while undervaluing or ignoring its own cultural (or musical) heritage. Whatever the rights and wrongs of these arguments, it is certain that John Peel made his listeners aware of various kinds of world music from the beginning of his UK broadcasting career. In 1967 Indian classical music was fashionable due to George Harrison's use of the sitar on some Beatles tracks, so Peel responded by occasionally playing tracks by Ravi Shankar on his Perfumed Garden show on Radio London. When he was hosting Top Gear on BBC Radio 1 he featured sessions by Indian classical musicians Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan, despite the fact that their music was radically different from anything else heard on the station.

Night Ride owed its unique format to the existence of a large collection of non-Western music in the BBC Sound Archives. Some of these "Archive Things", as Peel called them, were included in every edition of the programme. They appealed to late-sixties hippy taste for exotic and mysterious sounds and often blended surprisingly well with both the acoustic folk and experimental avant-garde music also featured on Night Ride.

to be continued....