UK DJ John Peel

It's difficult to convey to non-UK residents just how influential the late and much lamented BBC DJ John Peel was to (must be) two generations of popular music fans.
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John Peel's record collection: the first look

Britain's most celebrated record collection is up for scrutiny: John Peel's widow, Sheila Ravenscroft, lets Alexis Petridis take a first look at the DJ's vast and surprising haul

Alexis Petridis

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 May 2012 13.10 BST


Scrupulous filing system … just a small part of DJ John Peel's record collection.

In his unfinished, posthumously published autobiography, Margrave of the Marshes, there is a photograph of John Peel "compiling the running order for his programme in his room at home". It is notable largely because of the state of the room itself, which, while an improvement on Peel's infamously squalid office at Radio 1 – where five years' worth of Christmas cards hung from the ceiling, and his office-mate Andy Kershaw was obliged to conduct his business seated on an upturned rubbish bin – still looks like total chaos. Quite aside from the pair of trainers and what appears to be a Rastafarian's tam attached to the ceiling, the problem is the CDs and the records. They are everywhere: on the shelves, in boxes, on the floor, on top of the boxes on the floor, submerging a chair, wedging the late DJ into what looks to be about two square feet of floor space. And yet, according to his widow Sheila Ravenscroft, this photograph documents the first stage in a complicated and scrupulous filing system that Peel had maintained for his record collection since 1969. "Oh, he was absolutely meticulous. Obsessive. A lot of the rest of his life was chaotic, but when it came to music, he could tell straightaway if someone had taken something and put it back in the wrong place." She smiles. "You wouldn't think so, looking at his room."

Peel's is probably the most celebrated record collection in Britain: 26,000 albums, 40,000 singles and countless CDs, which spread out of Peel's office and took over a variety of rooms and outbuildings in the home near Stowmarket he invariably referred to as Peel Acres. The singles and CDs, Ravenscroft says, were filed alphabetically, but the albums were a different matter. "They are all filed numerically and cross-referenced with a very old filing cabinet, full of small filing cards that John hand typed himself on his old Olivetti typewriter. The way you access them is that you look in the filing cabinet, find the file card alphabetically, and on the top corner there's a number."

These filing cards have now formed the basis of The John Peel Project on The Space, an Arts Council-funded pop-up website, which launches this month and runs until the end of October. Every week, for the next 26 weeks, users will be able to browse the first 100 cards from each letter of the alphabet, with one album pulled out for special attention. "We will try to get a film of the artist, show old clips of them, look into what they are doing now," says Ravenscroft.

The first album singled out for special treatment is 1968's Save the Last Gherkin for Me by Mike Absalom. Ravenscroft says this was chosen simply because it bore the number 00001 in Peel's filing system – "It must have been the first alphabetically when he started cataloguing them like that" – though you could argue the choice says something fundamental about Peel: Absalom is the kind of character only he would have considered giving airtime to. Absalom began life at what you might call the Nuts-magazine end of the 1960s folk revival, knocking out bawdy rugby songs on a debut album even his own website advises you not to listen to; he currently works as a children's entertainer called Professor Absalom who, Ravenscroft notes, "looks a bit like Santa Claus as drawn by Raymond Briggs". In between, he has offered whimsical, slightly vaudevillian comic sagas of sex and drugs in Notting Hill (then a bohemian enclave of high hippydom) with titles such as The Saga of Peaches Melba and the Hash Officer, and Hector the Dope-Sniffing Hound. "Although I remembered his name, I couldn't remember what the music was like, but it was very much of that era," says Ravenscroft, which is putting it mildly; Save the Last Gherkin could only be more of its era if it offered you some Mandrax and encouraged you to join a macrobiotic commune.

A flick through the other 99 cards filed under A proves equally illuminating. There are the kind of largely forgotten names guaranteed to provoke a Proustian rush in Peel listeners of various eras: the Mick Abrahams Band, Action Pact, AC Temple. And there are entries that point to Peel as an incorrigible collector and tireless champion of the recherche: with all due respect to an oeuvre that included the piquant-sounding Fuckin' 4 Bucks and I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, how many albums by Washington DC splattercore pioneers the Accüsed does one man really need? In one instance, the sheer obscurity of the music seems to have overwhelmed even Peel. There is a card that features no track listing at all, merely the dark summary "16 songs in Hungarian".

There are also albums whose presence among the great man's record collection might cause even the most dedicated fans to raise an eyebrow. You expect Peel to have a lot of splattercore records with titles like I'll Be Glad When You're Dead – but who would have suspected a liking for a-ha's 1986 multi-platinum opus Scoundrel Days? Perhaps his kids liked it, in an act of intergenerational rebellion against dad's love of Extreme Noise Terror and Jackdaw With Crowbar. And who would have thought he owned a copy of Abba's discofied Voulez-Vous, delightful though the image of Peel kicking back at the end of a day spent exploring the outer limits of splattercore with a burst of Chiquitita may be? You can picture him spinning ABC's debut single – "and here are some lads who used to call themselves Vice Versa" – but who knew he stuck with them through 1983's career-derailing Beauty Stab and 1985's cartoony How to Be … a Zillionaire!?

And this is just A. The remaining 2,500 albums are still top secret, although the presence of a-ha and Abba, Ravenscroft says, is just the tip of the iceberg. "We've come up with some amazing stuff. There's stuff in there that people won't expect, stuff that I think John would have been really quite embarrassed about. Bands that latterly he criticised and wouldn't have dreamed of playing – there are quite a few of them. It's an indication of his very catholic taste. I shouldn't really be surprised by what he had. There are certain things I might pull a face at, but he was incredibly broadminded, not just in his music taste, but in the way he lived his life."

Eclectic, surprising, educational, the product of a restless enthusiasm for a variety of music so vast that only one man could possibly have liked all of it: the John Peel Project all seems very much in the spirit of the old radio show. But Ravenscroft says she is unsure what to do with the collection itself. Seven-and-a-half years after Peel's death, there are still records all over the house, she says, except in the kitchen and bedroom.

"I haven't moved them. When he first died, the last thing on earth I ever, ever wanted was anything to happen to it – because there it was, and as long as it was there, it was a huge part of John. But I have to say, seven-and-a-half years later, it's becoming a huge worry. He used to worry about it so much that, a long time before he did die, he'd already talked to the British Library and people about it. He really did want it to stay as a collection. I don't know what should happen, the whole logistics of it. But the one thing I do feel is that it shouldn't be gathering dust in our home."

Margrave of the Marshes- John Peel's uncompleted autobiography.

Peel died on an ill-advised vacation to Peru- he was a diabetic sensitive to the effects of high altitude- half-way through writing his autobiography, which was completed by his wife and children.

(Doubtless he was in pursuit of obscure recordings of Peruvian nose-flute maestros.)

In that sense alone, it must be an almost unique account of a man's life.

Highly recommended.