<story><title>John Peel Sessions</title><url>https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-sessions.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spatulon</author><text>For those who don&amp;#x27;t know of him, John Peel was a presenter&amp;#x2F;DJ on BBC Radio 1 from the 60s until his death in the mid 00s.&lt;p&gt;For as long as I&amp;#x27;ve been aware of it, Radio 1 has followed a format of playing mainstream pop music during the day, with more specialised and esoteric programming in the evening. When I was a teenager, Peel&amp;#x27;s show was on at 10pm on weeknights, and his main focus was on championing new and undiscovered bands, across many genres. The Peel sessions were part of this show, where a band would come in to record a live performance of a few songs.&lt;p&gt;I imagine a lot of bands can credit their success to John Peel playing their records and inviting them to record a session.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;I imagine a lot of bands can credit their success to John Peel playing their records and inviting them to record a session.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That dramatically understates the importance of Peel during his heyday. Before the internet, Peel was &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; way for bands to find an audience outside of their home town. For an entire generation of musicians, sending off a demo tape to Peel was a peculiar act of secular benediction, a message in a bottle cast into the waters in the hope that someone might read it.&lt;p&gt;His death in 2004 left a void that has never quite been filled. Despite the stalwart efforts of Tom Robinson and the BBC Introducing team, nobody has been able to replicate Peel&amp;#x27;s unique eclecticism and his remarkable ability to sniff out new talent. His peculiar alchemy attracted a wide audience while also offering an open door to the unknown, the unsigned and the unhinged.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;books&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;sep&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;how-john-peel-created-our-musical-world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;books&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;sep&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;how-john-peel-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=XPYkQi8olPo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=XPYkQi8olPo&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>John Peel Sessions</title><url>https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-sessions.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spatulon</author><text>For those who don&amp;#x27;t know of him, John Peel was a presenter&amp;#x2F;DJ on BBC Radio 1 from the 60s until his death in the mid 00s.&lt;p&gt;For as long as I&amp;#x27;ve been aware of it, Radio 1 has followed a format of playing mainstream pop music during the day, with more specialised and esoteric programming in the evening. When I was a teenager, Peel&amp;#x27;s show was on at 10pm on weeknights, and his main focus was on championing new and undiscovered bands, across many genres. The Peel sessions were part of this show, where a band would come in to record a live performance of a few songs.&lt;p&gt;I imagine a lot of bands can credit their success to John Peel playing their records and inviting them to record a session.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>... and to underline the diversity of the genres Peel championed: he was both one of the main early radio promoters of punk, but just a few earliers had championed Tangerine Dream&amp;#x27;s Phaedra as one of his favorite albums of the year.&lt;p&gt;I think that if you wanted to try and come up with a simple way to describe what connected all the music that Peel championed over his long career, it would have to be something like &amp;quot;new energy&amp;quot;. He didn&amp;#x27;t seem as interested in what a band actually sounded like as where their energy came from and what level it was on.</text></comment>