The usual best of year session repeats and the fourth part of the 1988 Festive Fifty. As indicated below, the complete show has recently been made available by Ray b.
JP starts the show by commenting, "D'you know I've don't think I've ever heard Cliff sounding better than he did tonight on Radio 1 FM."
Session Repeats[]
Overlord X, #2. Recorded 1988-08-02. No known commercial release.
(JP: "One or two people have written to me over the Christmas period asking when there's gonna be a new Radio 1 calendar. I'm sorry to have to tell you that there isn't going to be one for 1989. Not quite sure why this is: I suggested to them a kind of John Peel calendar, pictures of me lying like a beached whale on a number of the world's most glamorous beaches, but there wasn't a lot of interest in it.")
Billy Bragg: 'Valentine's Day Is Over' (Peel Session)
(JP: "A much sought-after session, this one. One or two people have written in again asking whether it's going to be issued by Strange Fruit on an EP, and I would imagine that the problems involved in putting out sessions by American bands would be insurmountable, well not far from it.")[1]
Billy Bragg: 'She's Got A New Spell' (Peel Session)
(JP: "I had one of those embarrassing experiences when a friend of mine came into the studio earlier this evening for the first time, and I always say to people, and I've said it on countless occasions, watching somebody doing a radio programme is not terrifically...actually, if you watch Steve Wright, it's spectacular because he does a lot, you know, but watching me is rather like watching somebody typing, and I always know that within a few moments, after about twenty minutes or so, people are going to begin looking around the studio, and sure enough, within about twenty minutes, he was reading Bruno Brookes' Christmas cards stuck up on the windows around here and so forth. He's gone now, I'll be a sadder and a wiser man.")
Pixies: 'In Heaven (The Lady In The Radiator Song)' (Peel Session)
(JP: "Doing the Festive Fifty is sort of, OK, you know, but it's all stuff that you'll have heard before, so it gets a bit kind of, 'that was, this is', you know.")
(JP: "You'd be surprised at some of the devices people use, you know, to try and find out what has actually come top of the Festive Fifty. People are quite shocking in their behaviour.")
(JP: "That seems to me to be a teen-terrific way to end the programme.")
File[]
Name
a) 27th December 88
b) 1988 (Complete) Radio Version Files 31-40
c) 'Festive 50s' folder, '1988' sub-folder, file F50_1988_2011 (#20-#11). The same file is also in '1990' sub-folder, file F50_1990_2011.
d) JP19881227.mp3
e) 1988-12-27 Peel Show
f) John Peel 27 Dec 1988 complete mw.mp3
Length
a) 01:05:13
c) 00:46:56
d) 01:57:40 Complete show
e) 01:50:45 complete show minus intro and little bits at tape flips.
f) 02:02:25
Other
e) Very good quality FM mono. A clearer recording than the others available here but due to low levels on the left hand channel this has been ripped as a mono recording. Created from SB709, SB710 and SB711 of Weatherman22's Tapes