Steve Lamacq hosts a tribute to Peel in John's usual 11 p.m. - 1 a.m. slot, with condolences and memories from JP listeners (for the full story on how this came about, see Ken Garner's The Peel Sessions, BBC Books 2007, pp. 10-12). Peel had died in Peru the previous day, and the show's production team chose Lamacq over the planned presenter, Rob Da Bank.
Mark, the show's taper, named the recording Night Of Sorrow and explained, in an email to SIG: "Mentioned this before many moons ago and sorting out some tapes I found it again yesterday - when I heard the news I went into shock and then my natural instinct was to hit record and hit the red wine - think it all got a bit much for me/fell into a drunken stupor so didn't record the whole show." Even so, just over half of the programme is available: classic session tracks are mixed with a script written by Lamacq himself.
It is assumed that the session tracks were played from official releases available at the time, as JP himself would have done: in other cases, BBC session tapes would have been used. All are detailed in the footnotes.
Sessions[]
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Tracklisting[]
File 1 starts
(SL (over Grinderswitch): "At ten o'clock, for years of our teenage lives, if you are of a certain age, you will remember this theme tune meant only one thing. The man who stood for the maverick, the misunderstood, the often much maligned, was about to lead us through another two hours of implausibly eclectic new music. He would excite and baffle us at different turns. This slightly understated, but redoubtable bloke would bundle through a pile of records that we simply wouldn't hear anywhere else on the radio. Over the years he championed the sort of bands who, in turn, would change people's lives and influence millions of records collections. And today, today we lost him. We're still struggling to come to terms with that, as I'm sure a lot of you are. The definitive anti-hero DJ, a giant of a man, tonight we dedicate this program to John's family, but tonight on Radio One, for the next two hours, we'll feature session tracks all booked by the genius John Peel. And to start, to borrow a phrase from John's old book of tricks, we'll begin with the Mighty Fall."