John Peel Top Ten 1981

John Peel's All Time Top Ten 1981.
Click on the image for a Youtube playlist of the songs.


Taken from the very great blog Like Punk Never Happened, which simply uploads editions of Smash Hits from thirty years ago. Simple but giving me hours of browsing pleasure. I had a subscription for years and used to love collecting the magazine in the local newsagent and seeing my surname in the top corner.

At the time there was a lot of crossover between Smash Hits and John Peel. More than one would imagine. Check it out.

Can't wait until it gets to my plea for penpals, which got around two thousand replies. One day we got an actual sack full of post delivered to our house. Wish I had them still. I could scan one every day and run a complementary blog.

Peeling in the Years

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.