Back in a Bit

If you’re the youngest sibling, you’ll know about hand-me-downs. I imagine that if there’s only a couple of years between you and the next, the thought of all those worn out, ill-fitting clothes probably makes you shudder. Fortunately for me, as a child at least, there’s a gap of over sixteen years between me and the next brother. That meant I got cool stuff.

In the late eighties, when he bought himself a new hifi, I inherited my brother’s old one. A massive long flat National Panasonic thing with a smokey-brown perspex lid, housing a turntable and a cassette deck that no longer worked. My collection of vinyl at the time extended to a single twelve-inch copy of “1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?)” by The Jams, which obviously I had to keep constantly hidden from my parents and didn’t dare play on the system in the lounge for fear of being asked what it was called. The stories of how I came by this record and eventually lost it again are long and boring, so I’ll save them possibly to inflict upon you at a later date.

But besides the fact that I could now listen to my favourite and only album in the privacy of my own room, the hifi had one other infinitely more exciting feature: an FM radio. While I had already inherited a small portable radio from my other brother, it could only receive medium and long-wave broadcasting. While listening to Radio 4 had sparked a fascination with the shipping forecast, I hadn’t found much else out there of interest. This was at a time when most of the big stations had shifted away from medium wave to the new shiny FM spectrum, and so could broadcast at a higher quality and in stereo.

My brother had the thing tuned to Capital, to which I listened for a couple of weeks. In this time, I learned two things: commercial radio was intended to sell things for which I had no need or way of buying, and popular music stations play more or less the same twenty songs over and over and over again. One night the novelty of this new station had worn thin enough for me to reach for the dial. The next thing I found was, I later discovered, interference and the very occasional garbled broadcast from AWE Burghfield. Turning back the other way, the stereo suddenly sprang into “Hey Hey We Are Not The Monkees”: the opening track on my only record.

Never had this happened before. Never had my exact choice of music been reflected by a radio station. Until that moment, radio was something designed for other people: a conversation between strangers on which I was trying hard to listen in. Suddenly, there was a voice talking to me. Suddenly, radio meant something to me. As I listened, more and more hardly-known records were played out, delighting my youthful ears. My mother’s irish eyes were certainly not smiling as she screamed around the door for me to turn that bloody thing off and get to bed young man. With the volume down very low, I unplugged one of the speakers and took the other one under the covers, pressed against my head so as not to miss a single second. I was awoken by my mother’s annoyance about finding me asleep with arm wrapped around the enormous chipboard speaker cabinet, still murmuring away.

Night after night this ritual continued. Studying the Radio Times had clarified that I was listening to the John Peel show on Radio 1. It was like this for over a year until, as punishment for some childhood crime, my mother took the plug off the stereo. By rights, I should have screamed the place down but, unbeknownst to my mother, the punishment coincided with the inheritance of my sister’s Sony Walkman.

I was to remain loyal to Peel’s broadcasts for years to come. I can’t claim to have heard every single show, as one’s teenage years are a bombardment of culture from all sides, but I’ve always returned to Peel for guidance in the ways of contemporary music. As I sit here typing this, I have recordings of the last nine weeks’ worth of shows occupying a significant proportion of server space in the kitchen, and item two on my post-it of things to do reads “stop faffing around and catch up with Peel”.

The delay has been caused by me investing every spare second into a solo album: my first such attempt. One of the records with which I was involved was played by John Peel—to my surprise, this is a strange and slightly unsettling experience. Of course, I meant nothing. I was merely part of the production, and my name didn’t even appear on the promo release. There was some solace in knowing that he didn’t know anything about me or my involvement in the record, so in the extremely unlikely event of us meeting I may have been able to resist telling him this boring story with embarrassing vigour. When we did meet at the unofficial launch of the same record at Metalheadz in Islington, it lasted only long enough for me attempt humour with “you’re shorter than you are on the radio”, and him to reply, quickly but kindly, “you fool”.

Although I made no conscious decision, I realise now that I intended to send him a pressing of my album upon its completion. I don’t think I ever expected him to play it, or even have the time to listen to it, but I hoped that someone at the BBC would at least unwrap it and put it with all the others marked for his attention. If by some miracle he actually listened to it, I hoped it would be at the wrong speed. The point is that it’s the done thing—when you go to paint woodwork, you sand the existing paintwork before you start: most of the time it makes very little difference and nobody notices either way, but it’s just what you do. When you make an album, you have it pressed and sent to Peel, it’s just what you do.

I find it interesting that this was not a decision I made. I didn’t set out to land my work in his lap and yet, with the album less than half completed, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have done so. Sending your record for the attention of John Peel at the BBC is all part of finishing an independent album. You don’t have to decide to do it, you just do it… and I guess it’s because he made you feel like you could.

Now he’s gone, I’m not left wondering to whom to send my album, for there is nobody else so seemingly open to such solicitation. Sending a copy to anyone else somehow seems like a shameless attempt at self-promotion. I often find myself queuing at the supermarket checkout in the vicinity of Colin Murray, yet the thought of “handing him a demo” makes me shudder in disgust.

Music lovers everywhere are mourning, and this is accentuated by the fact that it’s so hard to think of an appropriate course of action by way of remembrance. Personally, I’ve got nine weeks’ worth of him left, but I’m now putting off making a start as I know it’ll pass so quickly. Instead, I’ll probably prattle around with the album some more for a bit and see how I feel. After all, I’ve got to get it to the stage where it’s ready to send, and then make the conscious decision not to send it.

John, thanks for being the vessel through which so much inspiration flowed.