Alan Dell
Readers of the NME in 1981 might have been surprised to see John Peel list his favourite DJ of the year as Alan Dell, at the time host of Radio 2's The Dance Band Days.[1] His choice might have been interpreted as a slap in the face for his Radio 1 colleagues, but it was not the only time that Peel expressed his admiration for Dell, a DJ whose musical world - jazz big bands, British dance bands, singers of the Frank Sinatra era - seemed very different from his own. In Punch he wrote:
I recollect being given 78s by my grandfather at a very early age, and the old gentleman's judgement was sound enough for him to have bought for me "The Thing" by Phil Harris, and I had, over a period roughly bounded by the end of World War II and the end of rationing, hammered into smithereens my father's first-class collection of pre-war records, many of them works which now merit peculiar reverence when discussed on Alan Dell's splendid The Dance Band Days on Radio 2.... (Punch, 16 January 1980, quoted in The Olivetti Chronicles, pp. 251-2)
Peel's respect for Alan Dell (1924-1995) was based on Dell's broadcasting style, which placed the music, rather than his own personality, at the centre of the programme. Of course, this was also Peel's aim and therefore Dell's self-effacing manner and economy with words appealed to him.
Dell was born in South Africa and began broadcasting at the South African Broadcasting Corporation in 1943. His long career at the BBC began in the mid-1950s and took in a variety of programmes, many of them with an easy listening format. He presented Pick of the Pops in its first incarnation as a show reviewing new releases, in the pre-Alan Freeman era before it became a chart show. He was also a regular presenter of late-night shows on both the BBC and Radio Luxembourg, but was most associated with The Dance Band Days.
The music of the British dance bands of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s was unfashionable with younger listeners in the 1960s, despite (or because of) its popularity with a loyal, older audience, but gradually this situation began to change. Already in 1970 Richard Neville was writing in Oz of how some disillusioned ex-hippies had grown weary of the mediocrity of "underground rock" and were turning to LPs of The Golden Age of the British Dance Bands as an alternative. Later, the TV drama series written by Dennis Potter, Pennies from Heaven (1978), used actors miming to British dance band songs as part of the drama, provoking further reissue albums of the music it had featured. These were bought by younger viewers as well as by older dance band fans.
Although Alan Dell died in 1995, both the dance band music and the other forms of pre-rock'n'roll pop played on his programmes found a home on John Peel's shows, via the Peelenium and Pig's Big 78. In the twenty-first century, a general curiosity about the past has succeeded the purist attitude of earlier blues, folk or jazz specialists. Peel, with his wide experience of broadcasting and his broad musical tastes, was able to introduce old music of many kinds to his listeners, alongside the new and unfamiliar. It is likely that he had first heard some of these vintage records on Alan Dell's programmes.