Guardian

The Guardian is a long-established British daily newspaper that has also published the Observer Sunday paper since 1993.

Peel wrote pieces for The Guardian in the middle part of the 1990s.

Peel Articles

Several of the articles written by Peel for the newspaper were reprinted in Olivetti Chronicles:

• 1993-07-02, Glastonbury, pg. 100-3
• 1993-07-23, Phoenix Festival, pg. 223-5
• 1994-06-20, Radio 1, pg. 239-41
• 1994-08-12, Kenny Dalglish, pg. 47-8
• 1994-10-28, Archers, pg. 7-8
• 1995-03-11, Viv Stanshall, pg. 284-5
• 1995-04-28, Sound City, pg. 281-3
• 1995-08-28, Reading Festival, pg. 242-4
• 1996-07-17, World Service, pg. 345-6

Please add further information on articles written by Peel for The Guardian if known.

Peel Articles Available Online

Those with a subscription (freely available from many libraries) can read Peel's Guardian articles in their original form via the Guardian & Observer Digital Archive

The following articles are available without such a subscription:

1993

• July 2: When my son William was four or five his favourite sport was to kick a football as hard as his little legs would allow, past his groping father and into the ditch. This game was called, as you might imagine, Ball-In-Ditch. At last weekend's Glastonbury Festival I was forced to play a rather horrid variant on Ball-In-Ditch when I retrieved a football loaned by William's brother, Thomas, from a brook into which hundreds of music-lovers upstream had urinated ... (read more)
• September 3: I want to know what compering the Reading Festival (which I did last week) is no easy business. For three successive days I am on (or very near to) the main stage for 10 or 11 hours. And this is no running to centre stage in a funny hat and a ... (read more)
• November 27: Ray Charles is best known to today's young people, I dare say, for his performance in the Blues Brothers. His lively rendition of Shake A Tail Feather, during which a large body of people is seen to execute the more complex figures of the ... (read more)

1994

• April 30: It was a report in the Guardian of March 14 that brought me back to the true path. I confessed to having strayed and last year, for the first time in two decades, paid little heed to the Eurovision Song Contest. I watched the judging, as we all do, but ... (read more)
• June 28: "Say, you John Peel?", I nod. "Caught your show when you came over to New York and played the Limelight. Pretty cool." I nod again and smile a modest smile. Needless to say, I have never been to the Limelight. I haven't even been to New York for 30 years. But this is ... (read more)
• July 19: The weekend's Phoenix Festival, staged, for the second year, at Long Marston, nesr Stratford Upon Avon, started poorly for me. A photographer told me he wished to shoot off a roll on motordrive of my doing my thing. As my thing consists of ... (read more)
• July 22: Once the Magic Faraway Tree had lost its power to set my infant pulses pumping, I turned to Motor Racing, S C H Davis' history of the Bentley team of the 1920's. The names of Birkin and Benjafield (dear old Benjie), Barnato and ... (read more)
• October 28: Turn, if you will, to page 231 of The Book Of The Archers, put together by Patricia Greene (Jill  Archer), Charles Collingwood (Brian Aldridge) and Hedli Niklaus (Kathy Perks), and you will find a twenty-four-line entry under Peel, John. Yes it's me ... (read more)
• November 11: I was driving back from taking the children to the school bus, that ardent Thatcherite Emlyn Hughes, was saying on the Today programme that if Bruce was guilty (of offences with which, so far, only the tabloids have accused him) every illusion of every ... (read more)

1995

• March 11: I admired Viv's wit, imagination and lunatic sang-froid so much there were times when I would have wished to be him. ... He was, on his day, the funniest man in Britain. ... He was a great man and it has been our good fortune to catch some of the echoes of this greatness ... (read more)
• December 29: It is with what I cannot avoid describing as a thrill of horror that I have, this second, realised that 1996 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the Festive 50. Sometime in the autumn of 1976, then Radio 1 producer John Walters and I had the notion of inviting ... (read more)

1996

• July 17: I HAVE a friend who recently had a heart transplant. If you met him now, so healthy does he look, and indeed is, that you would think you need a heart transplant too. It's quite clearly nonsense; and that's what I think when I read the plans to reform the ... (read more)

1997

• April 16: I SHALL vote Labour as I always have done. I suppose I would stand more on the Tony Benn side of things, since these things seem to be, well, not sectarian exactly, but divided up. I'm definitely at the Tony Benn end of the spectrum. I've always voted ... (read more)

2001

• Nov 2 : There are no problems in finding the record, that's for sure. It's right there at the end of the shelf, along with other all-time favourites such as Stanley Wilson's No More Ghettos In America, the Quads' There Must Be Thousands, Don French's Lonely Saturday Night. You can spot it immediately because the paper sleeve is mustard yellow and slightly larger than the others. It is the Undertones' Teenage Kicks, still, after 23 years, the record by which all others must be judged ... (read more)

Articles about Peel

Many Guardian articles about or referencing Peel are available online at both the newspaper's homepage and Peel Links Scrapbook. It hoped eventually to provide a comprehensive index.

In 2022 theguardian.com published The 100 greatest BBC music performances - ranked!, a list of notable BBC radio and TV performances, which included several Peel session tracks, including full sessions by PJ Harvey, Half Man Half Biscuit, Black Sabbath, The Slits and The Smiths.

Links

• Wikipedia
• The Guardian homepage
• Guardian: John Peel tagged stories