His eclectic taste and honest, subjective approach to new music attracted a warm-hearted audience since he started to grace the Radio 1 airwaves in 1967. He was very influential in his own, unique way, however he was usually too 'indie' for me, being more of a Bob Harris man.
John Peel - Margrave of the Marshes, the second half of which was completed by his wife, Sheila, is a love story masquerading as the part-autobiograpgy of a gentle philosopher who always threw in a salty dose of reality to his broadcasts and the way he lived his life. His belief in the primacy of Liverpool FC, the love of his wife and their Suffolk home (Peel Towers - actually, a thatched cottage, from where he broadcast in later years) and an intrepid drive to be different on Radio 1 are constant themes throughout the book. His favoured Radio 1 'rhythm pals' included Johnnie Walker, Kid Jensen, producer John Walters and Andy Kershaw.
His public-school ('imperfect') education at Shrewsbury belies him, but he also belittles it beautifully in the book by writing that his children would say that it provided him only with 'the sort of education that enables you to talk for about twenty seconds on almost any topic, although there is no one thing thing about which you know a great deal'.
Peel was a Private-Eye loving maverick with the gift of the gab, whose style and bravado I much admired and - curiously - have something in common with. Both he and I attended the Martin Luther King memorial service in St Paul's Cathedral; he was outside with the crowds, while I was inside, singing as a 13-year-old chorister.
The best £3.25 I've spent on a hardback book in ages, courtesy of a charity shop in Canterbury last summer.
* Grauniad: A Life in Pictures
* BBC1 Tribute site
* Hear the voice of the legend and the sweet-eating game (courtesy of www.planetbods.org)
* Pics from the annual John Peel Day celebrated around the country
Human rights campaigner Martin Luther King preached at St Paul's Cathedral on his way to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr King preached to a full Cathedral at Evensong on 6 December 1964 (four years before he was assassinated), where he spoke of signs of a rapidly growing problem of race relations in Britain. 'We must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, substituting injustice of one type for that of another,' he said. 'God is not interested in the freedom of white, black or yellow men, but in the freedom of the whole human race.'
