Book description
This is a story of teenage dreams, which, as any Peel fan knows, are
hard to beat. Between 1967 and 2004 John Peel picked over 2000 bands
to come and record over 4000 sessions to be played on his radio show.
Many were young and had never been in a recording studio before, for
some it was the start of an illustrious career, for others it was the
only recognition their musical talent ever got.
For over 35 years the cream of British musical talent made the
journey to the BBC's studio in Maida Vale, from Pink Floyd to Pulp,
the Small Faces to the Smiths. And because John Peel was so respected
his sessions took on a legendary status - they were a rite of passage
that every new band wanted to go through.
Unfettered by commerical pressure the Peel Sessions were a unique
British institution - an archive of music that reflects one man's
passion for finding and encouraging new music.
Includes a full sessionography listing songs, band members and
broadcast dates.
Jarvis Cocker writing about his first Peel Session aged 18 (Wayne
the drummer was 15):
'We travelled down to Maida Vale in a van driven by a very strange
man we'd contacted via a card pinned to the Virgin record shop
noticeboard. We'd had to borrow lots of equipment from a band called
The Naughtiest Girl Was a Monitor 'cause we didn't have enough stuff
of our own. The session was to be produced by Dale Griffin, who used
to be the drummer in Mott the Hoople; I seem to remember that he was
wearing cowboy boots.
I think the crisis point came when Wayne was attempting to get a
home-made synth-drum to work that a friend of his at school had made
out of a rubber burglar-alarm mat and an old electronic calculator -
Dale Griffin looked at this 15-year-old kid crouching on the floor
bashing what looked like a doormat with some wires coming out of it
and just put his head in his hands. But to his credit, the session did
get finished and after it, everything else started for me...'
Ken Garner wrote In Session Tonight, a history of live pop on BBC
radio, described as "indispensable" by Q magazine, and "a
work of almost lunatic scholarship" by John Peel. He has worked as
a business reporter, magazine editor, and a newspaper radio critic. He
teaches journalism at Glasgow Caledonian University.
