Scotland

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Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and covers the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It shares a border with England to the south, and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the south-west. In addition to the mainland, the country is made up of more than 790 islands, including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides. Scotland's legal system has remained separate from those of England and Wales and Northern Ireland, and Scotland constitutes a distinct jurisdiction in public and private law.

Links To Peel[]

Peel had links to Scotland through his granny, Joan Murray, who was a Glaswegian and his support for Meadowbank Thistle football club. He would often visit Scotland to do his roadshow, especially Glasgow and Edinburgh, and he also hosted some of his BBC Radio One shows from there.

Even if the pirate ship Radio London was situated off the coast of south-east England, its medium wave signal was audible in Scotland, especially after dark, as shown in a 1967 Disc & Music Echo piece on Pink Floyd which described them listening to Peel's Perfumed Garden in a hotel room in Lossiemouth after a gig[1]. Therefore, the show had listeners in Scotland and Peel read out a letter from one of them, advocating the wearing of Perfumed Garden badges so that fans of the PG could recognise one another (see 19 July 1967 (Transcript)).

Not many Scottish artists were played on the PG (Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch), but once he had joined the BBC, Peel encouraged new artists from Scotland throughout his career, ranging from the Humblebums, Stone The Crows and the JSD Band to Altered Images, the Jesus And Mary Chain and Ballboy. In addition, some of his favourite artists were brought up in England but were of Scottish descent (Donovan, Rod Stewart, Richard Thompson, Al Stewart). Scotland was also the home of notable independent labels whose releases were played by Peel, including Postcard, Fast Product, Rock Action, Creeping Bent and Chemikal Underground.

Many Scottish artists recorded sessions for Peel, including Lulu, who was chosen for a session in 1967 to satisfy BBC management, who thought that the early Top Gear progammes did not include enough mainstream artists. Scottish artists were among those who did the most sessions for Peel, notably Ivor Cutler (22) and the Incredible String Band (12). In 2009, BBC Scotland broadcast John Peel's Scottish Sessions, a documentary special about local artists who recorded sessions for the DJ.

Memorial to Peel's hero, Bill Shankly, that was shown on Sounds Of The Suburbs: Lanarkshire

On Sounds Of The Suburbs, broadcast in 1999, Peel visited Lanarkshire in southern Scotland to interview artists including Sean Dickson of the Soup Dragons and High Fidelity. In the same programme, he tasted a deep fried Mars bar, a dish originated by a chip shop in Scotland, and declared it to be not too bad. At the end of the documentary, Peel also made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of a personal hero, Bill Shankly, a former miner and manager of Liverpool Football Club, in Glenbuck (the DJ's all-time favourite football player, LFC legend Kenny Dalglish, is also Scottish).

On 23 January 2003, the DJ hosted a "Burns (pre-) Supper Special", with Scottish artists Belle & Sebastian, Ballboy and the Delgados performing musical settings of poems by Scotland's national bard.