Peel

Driving past Rhino Records on Westwood tonight, their entire marquee sign was given over to a very simple message: ‘RIP John Peel 1939-2004’. I found that very touching, though at the same time wondered how many of the other drivers on the rush-hour street would know who Peel was. Probably not many.

Even though I scarcely ever listened to Peel’s show, and our musical tastes barely overlapped, I still felt the loss when I read that he’d died. He was perhaps the youngest 65-year-old on the face of the planet, and it wasn’t his time yet. The BBC will miss him hugely. He embodied a gentle but cranky rebelliousness that was particularly British. It was reassuring to know that he was there, even if he had no direct relevance to my life; he was part of the landscape, a background noise of Britishness that somehow holds the country together, like George Lucas’s Force but with extra sarcasm, like the Women’s Institute but heavy on the beard.

I’ve not seen this mentioned anywhere in the obituaries I’ve read — and there’s no reason why it should have been; it has nothing to say about him as a person — but Peel was there the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I wonder how many others who were there are still alive.