{"id":164,"date":"2004-10-29T20:37:42","date_gmt":"2004-10-29T20:37:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=164"},"modified":"2018-07-17T17:37:50","modified_gmt":"2018-07-18T00:37:50","slug":"peel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2004\/10\/peel\/","title":{"rendered":"Peel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Driving past Rhino Records<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’ve not seen this mentioned anywhere in the obituaries I’ve read \u2014 and there’s no reason why it should have been; it has nothing to say about him as a person \u2014 but Peel was there the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I wonder how many others who were there are still alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[35,15],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-john-peel","tag-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":936,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions\/936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}