The Diesel-U-Music Awards was a music award ceremony sponsored by the Italian jeans company Diesel, founded by Adriano Goldschmied and Renzo Rosso in 1978. The awards were broadcast on Channel 4 in the early / mid 00's and was primarily aimed at underground musicians.
Links To Peel[]
Peel made an appearance at the 2004 Diesel-U-Music Awards, which was broadcast on 20th July 2004 on Channel 4, where he won the Outstanding Contribution to Underground Music and made the following speech:
Diesel-U-Music Awards 2004 Full
Peel receives his award between 20:07 and 23:50 of the video
"That's very nice of you, thank you very much. You usually win this sort of award for not being dead in my experience. I should suppose which somebody did earlier on thank my team who are with me tonight. I had loads of different teams over the years. At the moments it's, I'm afraid they haven't got exciting names at all, they are Louise, Mark and Hermeet. Interesting in view of what Mick Jones was saying, I actually was in the army, and its because of my efforts as 23558538 Gunner Ravenscroft J you could all sleep easily in your beds tonight. I got a long speech, but I'm bursting for a piss. I will say something which I always told our children and they obviously thought 'what an old tosser he is', but I always told them you are the sum of much of your failures as you are of your successes and if you end up doing something you like doing, and by God I certainly do that, have done that like for 30 something years now, you got there because you failed that exam or you didn't get that job, and that's something for you to bear in mind if your fucked off if you have. It's a very important thing. Thanks very much."
After the speech, several musicians praised the DJ in the TV studio including the Infadels, DJ Sushi, Tim Westwood and Mick Jones of The Clash. Later Peel also commented in the studio on his music tastes:
"Most people my age are kind of locked into some era, they've gone as old people often do, into kind of J-A-Z-Z you know, but I'm interested in hearing stuff I've not heard before".