John Peel, 1971

"The thing is that you get a lot of credit for putting these bands on the radio, but the fact is that it's like being the editor of a newspaper - you don't claim credit for the news. It's my job to listen to bands and listen for musicians from around the world and put them on the radio, and this is not something that I would wish to be applauded for really, because I'm just doing what I'm paid to do. They discover themselves, it's not up to me to discover them, bands discover themselves - they make the records, the records arrive; I think, 'let's play it on the radio,' and when they come over here I think, 'let's book them for a session.' That's how the process works. It's very little to do with me to be honest." - John Peel

John Peel was Britain's most durable and consistently innovative disc jockey for almost 40 years. While most of his Radio One colleagues became identified with a specific era, style or genre of music and were soon superseded by younger faces, Peel endured thanks to his remarkable ability to adapt to changing musical fashions and to remain at the cutting edge of taste. He had a seemingly bottomless enthusiasm for the new and the leftfield, and in his time he championed underground, progressive rock, punk, reggae, hip hop, hardcore and ethnic music long before they crossed into the mainstream. Once they did, he frequently lost interest and went off in search of the next musical innovation. In later years he broadened his appeal as a broadcaster beyond his Radio One audience and presented Home Truths on Radio Four, a much-loved weekly miscellany that chronicled the eccentricities of British middle-class life.

Born John Robert Parker Ravenscroft into a well-off family in Heswall near Liverpool a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War, he was educated as a boarder at Shrewsbury School. His life was changed in the 1950s, like that of so many of his generation, by the advent of Rock'n'Roll. It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession, although any thoughts of a career in popular music had to be put on hold while he completed his National Service. On his demobilization in 1962, he went to the US, initially to work for his father's cotton business. His encyclopedic musical knowledge and the emergence of a phenomenon called the Beatles who fortuitously happened to come from his hometown meant that he was soon an in-demand guest on local radio stations in Dallas, Texas. Carefully cultivating his Liverpudlian connections, he became something of a minor celebrity and went on to work as a disc jockey for stations in Oklahoma City and San Bernardino, California. An early marriage to an American did not last.

By 1967 America had finally started to counter the British musical invasion of the mid-Sixties with its own new "underground" rock sound, based mainly on the West Coast. Typically, Peel immersed himself in the new scene and when he returned to Britain with a bunch of records by the likes of Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band and Country Joe and the Fish, such artists seemed as exotic and mysterious to British listeners as the Beatles had a few years earlier to American fans. It was the heyday of the pirate radio stations, and with no outlet for a broadcaster of such eclectic and non-mainstream tastes on the BBC's conservative Light Programme, he landed a show on Radio London, which rivaled Radio Caroline as the most popular of the off-shore broadcasters.

John Peel with Don VanVliet of Captain Beefheart

Adopting the name John Peel, he called his late night show The Perfumed Garden and set about turning it into a flagship for the nascent "flower power" generation, as he used it to introduce British audiences to American bands such as the Mothers of Invention and the Velvet Underground. He also championed a new breed of British underground acts, such as Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine and the Incredible String Band. When the Marine Offences Act effectively outlawed offshore broadcasting in August 1967, Peel was one of several pirate disc jockeys to switch to Radio One, the new BBC vehicle designed to replace the now illegal stations. Through his Sunday afternoon show Top Gear, he continued to promote new music, mixing records with "in the studio" sessions by new bands, most of whom could not get a look-in on the airwaves. He also had a late-night show where he played an even more eclectic selection of the weird and wonderful.

Many of the obscure acts he showcased via his Top Gear sessions went on to become household names. Marc Bolan was a close friend, and Tyrannosaurus Rex, who were regulars on his early programmes, owed their success in no small part to his unswerving support. Rod Stewart and the Faces was another group supported by Peel when few others wanted to know. After they became successful, they repaid the favour by inviting him to appear with them on Top of the Pops, where he pretended to play the mandolin on Maggie May.

He threw himself wholeheartedly into the counter-culture of the time and contributed articles not only to the music press but also to such hippie house journals as Oz and Gandalf's Garden. He filled his columns with semi-mystical flower-power musings, the feyness of which in later life caused him a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. In one infamous column, which he would never have got away with today, he described the delight of sitting on Primrose Hill in the afternoon sunlight watching young schoolgirls walk past. At times he was in open conflict with the BBC hierarchy and with his fellow, more conventional Radio One disc jockeys, whose chart-orientated musical tastes he openly derided on air. He also hated the slick approach of colleagues such as Tony Blackburn, and his own style could not have been more different. It became commonplace for him to play records at the wrong speed, lose his running order or forget the name of the track he had just played. The BBC was sensible enough to realize that it was all part of his charm, and that it was his refusal to toe the line that was largely responsible for his popularity.

In 1969 he set up his own record label, Dandelion, and signed a roster of willfully non-commercial acts, including Principal Edward's Magic Theatre (whom he put up in his house for a time), Bridget St John, Kevin Coye and Medicine Head, who gave the label its only Top 30 hit with Pictures in the Sky. At one point he even had the bizarre idea of forming a group called 101 Sharons, with the intention of finding that number of female singers with the same name. Legend has it that he abandoned the project when he got to 40. Such a cavalier approach to commercial success could not last, and the label closed in late 1972. The 26 albums Peel released in the three years of the label's existence all later became collectors' items.

Peel in his BBC Studio