Today has been designated keepingitpeel day and the idea is that people blog about music from a Peel session or share links to Peel Sessions etc.
It's hard to think of what music to blog about as Peel was so central to my introduction to music. I started listening about 1979/80 when I was 11/12 years of age and still hear things that bring me back to lying in bed with the radio on low listening to Peel introducing yet another of the bands that would form part of my musical constellation over the rest of my life.
Subway Sect, Wire, Magazine, PIL, Dexys, Specials, Madness, Desperate Bicycles, The Slits, The Skids, Augustus Pablo... the list is long. Many times in later years I would listen to something and it would be familiar from Peel and some of the many cassettes I would make on my cheap tape recorder and a sixties radio something like the ones above. If my music taste is eclectic this was the source.
Later there was excitement when John took up one of my favourite Dublin bands, The Stars of Heaven and played them and had them in to do sessions, one of which was released as one side of their rather wonderful Sacred Heart Hotel. The Peel session got them mainstream press and the title song was a regular on Irish daytime radio for a while.
Today I still listen to old John Peel shows sourced from the rather wonderful John Peel Wiki. I look forward to someone posting the session by friends and one time co-conspirators Luggage who counted me as their manager for a while and played many gigs with The Knocking Shop who, I fear to say, never had a Peel Session. (In fact we were too disorganised to even send him a copy of our cassette album)
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