Holy Crap!
Buffista Music II: Wrath of Chaka Khan
There's a lady plays her fav'rite records/On the jukebox ev'ry day/All day long she plays the same old songs/And she believes the things that they say/She sings along with all the saddest songs/And she believes the stories are real/She lets the music dictate the way that she feels.
Was just about to post that. So very very sad.
More to say about Peel. Since the late 60s, he'd been playing the latest, weirdest, wildest music every week. He was the first to play everything from Pink Floyd to Dizzee Rascal on national radio. Every music fan I know thought of him as their favourite uncle. For me his voice and new music is inseperable - the number of songs I automatically associate with the little snatch of him talking caught on a tape I made of his show when I was 14 is uncountable. From when I was 11 to this last week, every time I listened to his show I heard something brilliant. It'd be easier for me to list the bands I love that I didn't first hear on Peel. I hate phrases like end of an era, but UK music radio will never be the same again.
To steal a line from a blogger about Peel:
It's like part of the culture going - like a library burning.
That's an apt statement. RIP, John Peel.
Wow. It just seemed like he was always going to be there, you know?
For those unfamiliar, John Peel also had bands come in and play live, in studio. They weren't little acoustic things, but the full band. What you got was an interesting in-between track which showed off the band's live capacity, but with studio fidelity.
My favorite such Peel session might be The Only Ones. But there were many, many other revelatory ones.
The Peel sessions weren't necessarily recorded live, but due to time constraints, they were generally more "raw" than a band's studio recordings.
The Peel sessions weren't necessarily recorded live, but due to time constraints, they were generally more "raw" than a band's studio recordings.
They weren't much more than four track, though, right?
Peel tirelessly advocated for The Fall, too. I'd go so far as to contend that Mark E. Smith would be a dockworker without John Peel. My favorite Peel Sessions: Sonic Youth doing Fall songs a year or two ago, the Slits inventing Brit rap in 1979, and Can engaging in some serious sonic deconstruction in the late 70s.
They weren't much more than four track, though, right?
I think they used a 16 track recorder.