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Peel 117 (BFBS)

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Show

Name
  • John Peel's Music On BFBS
Station
YYYY-MM-DD
  • 1989-09-23
Comments
  • John's tales of his birthday party: two members of Eton Crop and Robert Wyatt also attended. A slightly shorter version appears in 11 September 1989.

Sessions

  • None

Tracklisting

23 September 1989 (BFBS)

(JP: 'I'll tell you why it is that I'm in such a good mood this week. For last weekend, we had organised a birthday party: now I know my birthday party was several weeks ago, but for one reason or another we couldn't have a party at home until last weekend. Because of this, it kind of built and built and built, like Topsy it just grew and grew. People came over from Germany and from Holland: people like the Lance Bombardier Gerald T. Fox was here, the Garageland posse and so forth...and people from the village came along....inevitably our friends there...very very few showbiz people, I'm pleased to be able to tell you, hardly any record industry people at all and only those that are most sympathetic, really people who are friends of mine despite being in the record industry....By the time we actually got started, it went on over the whole weekend, it gradually built from the Friday night up until the last people left on Monday afternoon. There were a couple of hundred people there, perhaps more than that, I'm not sure exactly how many. Sheila had arranged for a large marquee to be established on our lawn because the house isn't very big and there certainly wouldn't have been room for that number of people in it. I didn't pay that much attention to what was going on: I'm one of those people, I'm amazingly unobservant in certain areas, which for reasons which will become apparent is not a bad thing. Anyway, this marquee went up and there was a kind of dance floor established on it, and a small stage at one end, but only about six inches high, and I thought it was just something which as a matter of course they put in there, you know, just like a little stage...we were having a disco, and it became obviously ludicrous to try and put the disco on there because the disco would have jumped about and so forth, so we had to put that on the grass behind. It went on, and I had a few beers, and a lot more people turned up with lots of prezzies and so on, a general mounting excitement. Sheila came in and said, "Don't go into the marquee at the moment because the children are planning a little surprise and so forth, and they wouldn't want you to spoil it," OK fair enough, I went along with that. So things went on and on, more and more people arriving, people parking their cars in the field across the road, great excitement, people I hadn't seen for years: people I hadn't seen at all actually, because I'd invited one or two people who write regularly to the programmes that I do in Britain who I'd never actually met....Eventually, when the marquee was by and large full, I kind of wandered in there, you know, and had a few more beers, and didn't really pay a great deal of attention to what was going on around me. I saw there were a lot of monitors on the stage, and I thought, well it seems a bit excessive for a disco, the records are all thundering away and everybody seemed to be having a good time, so I didn't really pay much attention to it. And then Sheila tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Look who's just come in." So I turned round, and I looked at these people, and I thought, "Hold on, I know who they are!" And, well, this is who it was.')
(JP: 'To continue the story, the Four Brothers played at my birthday party and it was absolutely stunning. Most of the people there, no real interest in popular music of any sort, beyond like listening to the radio a little bit from time to time. By the time they'd finished, it was one of those things that supports all of the arguments that I've advanced over twenty years or so of being on the radio in Britain, that people actually, given the opportunity, will listen to and enjoy a wider range of things than by and large they are offered....It was like a Revivalist meeting: I've got a bit of it on video...everyone just grinning from ear to ear, everybody dancing like mad.....Frankly, the best night of my life, absolutely unbelievable. I didn't know obviously that it was going to happen, and if I had done, then I'd have invited you.')
(JP: 'People keep telling me that they're going to get back together again and do some more stuff, but in a sense, I have mixed feelings about it. I sometimes prefer it when bands have sort of done things that you've really enjoyed enormously, particularly when they've been amusing things and running contrary to the general flow of the time, which they were. Things were getting rather serious and kind of introspective and so on: to come up with things based on football and cheap television seemed to be ideal: perhaps it wouldn't work again if they were to do it now.')

end of show

File

Name
  • Peel 117
Length
  • 00:42:48
Other
  • Many thanks to Dirk.
Available
Footnotes
  1. ↑ Human League cover.
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