John Peel Wiki
in: 1970, Peel shows, Top Gear,
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30 May 1970

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Show[]

Name
Station
YYYY-MM-DD
  • 1970-05-30
Comments
  • The Mungo Jerry single, subsequently a UK #1 hit, was played for second successive week, after Peel saw them at the Hollywood Festival the previous weekend (see Gigography 1970). ). He says they were “the hit of the thing…..the effect they had on the audience had to be seen to be believed….” - and also that he’d been told while it was playing that it was the fifth play of the song on Radio 1 that day.
  • The Free single, played here for the first time on Top Gear, was also a #1 hit that summer.
  • Album tracks featured by future 1970s stars Elton John (from his debut album) and Alice Cooper (from their second LP, for Frank Zappa's Straight Records).
  • The Bobby Lee Trammell single later turned up in John Peel's Record Box. He says he paid a lot of money for it in a record auction and suspects a line in the lyric may have inspired the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”.
  • THere is also a track from a solo LP by Ed Sanders of the Fugs. The lyrics are about the female groupies known as the Plaster Casters[1] (“a plaster caster girl”).
  • JP announces the latest listeners’ contest “combined with a form of guerrilla action, in a manner of speaking” - contestants have to send in photos of American tourists, as a response to them going around taking photos of everything else. The prize "may" be a night out with Robert Wyatt of the Soft Machine.
  • Before the Tom Paxton track, JP remarks: "In one of the singularly boring and ill-written pieces that somebody ghosts for me in one of the music papers I raved at length about the new Tom Paxton LP…..". How serious he was about his columns (presumably in Disc & Music Echo) being ghost-written is uncertain, but he says the rave comments about the Paxton album were justified.

Sessions[]

Tracklisting[]

File[]

Name
  • J P Top Gear 30 May 1970 complete.mp3
Length
  • 1:58:20
Other
  • Many thanks to Tim for digitisation and upload
Available
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