John Peel was a DJ on England's BBC Radio One from 1967-2004. He would become one of Britain's most popular radio personalities, known in particular for his "Peel Sessions," for which thousands of bands recorded four-song performances in the BBC studio.
Fast Facts:
- Name: John Robert Parker Ravenscroft
- Born August 30, 1939 in Heswall, England
- Died October 25, 2004
- First Radio Station: WRR Radio, Dallas, Texas
- First to play The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper and the Sex Pistols "God Save the Queen" on the radio
- Favorite Song: "Teenage Kicks" by The Undertones
- Occasional presenter on TV show Top of the Pops
- Band The Fall would play 24-hour radio sessions for Peel
- Attended press conference with Lee Harvey Oswald just before Oswald's assassination
- Worked in America as a traveling insurance salesman and cotton producer
Career Overview
Peel got his first radio job at Dallas' WRR Radio in 1964, and worked as the station's "Official Beatles correspondent." He married his first wife, Shirley Anne Milburn in Dallas in 1965, when she was only 15. They divorced in 1973.
Peel returned to England in 1967 and worked for a pirate radio station, Radio London, on a show he called The Perfumed Garden. He brought a lot of the era's most significant and ground-breaking music to the attention of the greater British public for the first time, including Bob Dylan, Love, The Doors, The Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd and Cream.
By the end of 1967, after Radio London had shut down, Peel joined the line-up on pop radio station BBC Radio 1, on a show called Top Gear and then on a show called Night Ride. When that show ended officially in 1975, he stopped bothering to name his shows at all, and would just refer to them by his own name.
