I could write of John Peel, of his lugubrious wit, his modesty, his enthusiasm, of the records he played before anyone else and the artists who owe him almost everything, but I’m not sure my memories would differ from those of others in any but the most unimportant of details. And I would have missed in recording the public details of his life what was most intimate in my relationship to a man I never knew and never met but who was nevertheless a kind of friend.
I listened to him for twenty years; to mark his death is to mark an era in my life – one which, if he had not died at just 65, would have remained open, indefinite, for as long as he continued to play the music that he did.
When did I first hear him? 1984. Twenty years, then – sometimes, it is true, I did not listen for a few weeks or months, but I always came back. And even as I’d turned from listening to his show to something else, I knew he was there, that John Peel maintained himself in the opening to what was new in music. That he was there for me and for all of us, listening for us, playing records for us.
And now? His early death – twenty years too early – closes a door on the future of music. And upon that future which drew me back to those times when as an adolescent I first discovered that world of independent record labels and artists who did not deserve obscurity.
I discovered it through him and with him, John Peel – through him first of all and not through the music papers of the time, which were to susceptible to changing fashions. Now, who will play the music John Peel played? No one. There are other shows, it is true and other DJs, but none whose continuity was part of the continuity of my life and the lives of so many.
To mourn is also to mourn for yourself, for the adolescent and young adult that you were and now the man that you are. To the adolescent who is also alive in you as he was in John Peel: to the inexhaustible teenager for whom music is the opening of the new itself.
John Peel. All of us who listened to him, who listened with him, owe it to him now to listen out for our youth as it comes towards us from the future.
Lars Iyer's Blog 