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This
was a welcome release, which gave people a chance to own decent quality
verions of session recordings previously only held on a wanky cassette
tape recorded from a wanky stereo system. More importantly though, it
offers an alternative to some of their more overproduced studio efforts.
Many of the recordings have much more passion than their more sterile
official counterparts. That said, it still tends to be the full releases
that hit my turntable, and even with the songs from the hopelessly overproduced
'Crooked Mile' there are pros and cons between the two recordings. There
are still a few interesting and unique moments on the sessions, not least
the tortured ending to 'Everybody Is Dead'.
Sadly the LP and CD do not include all the Peel songs and none at all
from the final session. Minor tinkering to the session orders also produces
minor anal-retentive irritation.
The full Peel sessions were as follows:
Peel 1- recorded 3 Aug 1983- Before Famine, Sleepless, Sun, Moon.
Peel 2- recorded 14 Jan 1984- This Liberal Love, Escalator In The Rain,
Dolly, Everybody Is Dead.
Peel 3- recorded 14 Apr 1984- A Friend With A Big Mouth, Teddy Dogs, Dreaming
Drains, Loftholdingswood.
Peel 4- recorded 2 Oct 1984- Genius, 464, Goodbye It's 1987, Horse Overboard.
Peel 5- recorded 3 Dec 1985- Begging Bowl, People Just Want to Dream,
Bullwhip Road, Town To Town.
Peel 6- recording date unknown- Half A Day, Armadillo Man, And He Descended
Into Hell, Soul Boy.
The only other known radio recording was a 'Saturday Live' feature with
'A Friend With A Big Mouth', 'Loftholdingswood' and '464'.
Not much more to say about this one except a big thank you to John Peel.
One of the few people who got behind Microdisney and realised their true
quality. A wonderful person, he showed independence, ethics and plain
good taste where other DJ's simply followed trends or did what the pluggers
told them to do. For a whole generation of 'indie' people almost everything
they listened to had it's roots in the John Peel show. How many of my
favourite bands would have made it without him is anyone's guess, but
it sure wouldn't have been all of them. There may have been people more
worthy of his high-ranking position in the '100 Great Britons' poll but
he still fully deserves the acknowledgement. My life would have been much,
much worse if he hadn't existed.
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