The 1976 Festive Fifty remains something of a holy grail among collectors of Peel shows, and no recordings from any of the programmes have come to light as yet. If you have such a thing, or any old recordings on tape, you are urged to contact the Peel Mailing List, where your arrival will be greeted with much rejoicing. EDIT - the rejoicing may begin. Many thanks to taper John Cavanagh and his pal Ken for making this show available after all those years.
Start of show: "'Well, we have no sign of the hymn tune Repton here, I'm afraid, but we do have tonight further selections from the year's best sessions, this time those from Strecth, Bill Aitken and Racing Cars, and we also take up the Festive Fifty once again at number 35, and I will read out for latecomers a resume of what the dolts have missed. Two hours of remarkably good music, all things being considered, and we start with...."
Sessions
Stretch, #3 (rpt). Recorded 1976-09-30. No known commercial release. 'The Way Life Is' not TX in this show.
Bill Aitken, one and only session (rpt). Privately recorded June 1975. The remaining two tracks were TX on 03 January 1977. [1]
Racing Cars, #2 (rpt). Recorded 1976-09-09. No known commercial release.
(JP: 'On most of the sessions we've had during the year, the engineering's been done by Bill Aitken, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't do the engineering on that Racing Cars session. [2] And of course, you may recall that earlier in the year, we had a session from Bill himself, tapes that he'd put together entirely by himself and in his own time, and we broadcast them and they were very good. Since then. Bill's been working on his LP with a bunch of other musicians, and hopefully this LP will be released sometime early in the New Year. Anyway, this is the first from Bill.')
(JP: 'He's not bad at all, is he, actually? We must try and get a new session from him sometime early in the New Year. That's Bill Aitken, and that's his own song called 'Ghosts Of Yesterday'. And we'll be resuming with John Peel's Festive Fifty at number 35 in just a moment or so, but before that....')
Stretch: 'Rock ‘N Roll Hoochie-Coo' (Peel Session)
The Festive Fifty Of 1976: Numbers 35-25
(JP: 'And now we start back again with Peel's Festive Fifty, and for those of you who have no idea what that is, back in about the middle of November, we invited listeners to nominate their three all-time favourite tracks whether they were LP tracks or singles, send them to us on a postcard in order and we'd award them points on a 3-2-1 basis, and build from that your Festive 50. And for those of you who missed the first two broadcasts of the Festive 50 on Christmas Eve and last night, let me remind you what you've missed.') Rundown of numbers 50-36 ensues.
(JP: 'Don't know why it's called John Peel's Festive Fifty: bit of a misnomer actually....Up until now, you might have been excused for believing that the whole thing was rigged by me cos there are a lot of my favourites in there. This should convince you otherwise, though.')