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John Robert Parker Ravenscroft (30 August 1939 – 25 October 2004), better known as John Peel, was an English radio presenter and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original disc jockeys on BBC Radio 1, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004. Peel was one of the first broadcasters to play psychedelic rock and progressive rock records on British radio. He is widely acknowledged for promoting artists of many genres, including pop, dub reggae, punk rock and post-punk, electronic music and dance music, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip hop. Fellow DJ Paul Gambaccini described Peel as "the most important single person in popular music from approximately 1967 through 1978. He broke more important artists than any individual." Peel's Radio 1 shows were notable for the regular "Peel sessions", which usually consisted of four songs recorded by an artist in the BBC's studios, often providing the first major national coverage to bands that later achieved fame. The annual Festive Fifty countdown of his listeners' favourite records of the year was a notable part of his promotion of new music. Peel appeared on television occasionally as one of the presenters of Top of the Pops in the 1980s, and provided voice-over commentary for a number of BBC programmes. He became popular with the audience of BBC Radio 4 for his Home Truths programme, which ran from the 1990s, featuring unusual stories from listeners' domestic lives. Early life Peel was born John Robert Parker Ravenscroft at a nursing home in Heswall on 30 August 1939, the son of Joan Mary (née Swainson) and cotton merchant Robert Leslie Ravenscroft. He had two younger brothers and grew up in the nearby village of Burton. He was educated as a boarder at Shrewsbury School, where future Monty Python member Michael Palin was his contemporary. In his posthumously published autobiography, Peel said that he was raped by an older pupil while at the school. Peel was an avid radio listener and record collector from an early age, firstly of music offered by the American Forces Network and Radio Luxembourg. He recalled an early desire to host a radio programme of his own "so that I could play music that I heard and wanted others to hear". His housemaster, R. H. J. Brooke, whom Peel described as "extraordinarily eccentric" and "amazingly perceptive", wrote on one of his school reports, "Perhaps it's possible that John can form some kind of nightmarish career out of his enthusiasm for unlistenable records and his delight in writing long and facetious essays." Peel completed his national service in 1959 in the Royal Artillery as a B2 radar operator. Afterwards, he worked as a mill operative at Townhead Mill in Rochdale and returned each weekend to Heswall on a scooter borrowed from his sister. While in Rochdale during the week, he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in the area of Milkstone Road and Drake Street, and developed long-term associations with the town as the years progressed. Career United States In 1960, aged 21, Peel went to the United States to work for a cotton producer who had business dealings with his father. He took a number of other jobs afterwards, including working as a travelling insurance salesman. While in Dallas, Texas, where the insurance company he worked for was based, he conversed with the presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, and his running mate Lyndon B. Johnson, who were touring the city during the 1960 election campaign, and took photographs of them. Following Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Peel passed himself off as a reporter for the Liverpool Echo in order to attend the arraignment of Lee Harvey Oswald. He and a friend can be seen in the footage of the 22/23 November midnight press conference at the Dallas Police Department when Oswald was paraded before the media. He later phoned in the story to the Echo. While working for the insurance company, Peel wrote programs for punched card entry for an IBM 1410 computer (which led to his entry in Who's Who noting him as a former computer programmer), and he got his first radio job working unpaid for WRR (AM) in Dallas. There, he presented the second hour of the Monday night programme Kat's Karavan, which was primarily hosted by the American singer and radio personality Jim Lowe. Following this, and as Beatlemania hit the United States, Peel was hired by the Dallas radio station KLIF as the official Beatles correspondent on the strength of his connection to Liverpool. He later worked for KOMA in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, until 1965, when he moved to KMEN in San Bernardino, California, and used his birth name, John Ravenscroft, to present the breakfast show. Return to England Peel returned to England in early 1967 and found work with the offshore pirate radio station Radio London. He was offered the midnight-to-two shift, which gradually developed into a programme, The Perfumed Garden. Peel's show was an outlet for the music of the UK underground scene. He played classic blues, folk music and psychedelic rock, with an emphasis on the new music emerging from Los Angeles and San Francisco. As important as the musical content of the programme was the personal – sometimes confessional – tone of Peel's presentation, and the listener participation it engendered. Underground events he had attended during his periods of shore leave, such as the UFO Club and the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, together with causes célèbres like the drug busts of the Rolling Stones and John "Hoppy" Hopkins, were discussed between records. All this was far removed from Radio London's daytime format. Listeners sent Peel letters, poems and records from their own collections so that the programme became a vehicle for two-way communication; by the final week of Radio London he was receiving far more mail than any other DJ on the station. After the closure of Radio London in 1967, Peel wrote a column, The Perfumed Garden, for the underground newspaper the International Times (from autumn 1967 to mid-1969). BBC When Radio London closed on 14 August 1967, Peel joined the BBC's new music station, BBC Radio 1, which was first broadcast on 30 September 1967. Unlike Big L, Radio 1 was not a full-time station but a broadcaster of a mixture of recorded music and live studio orchestras. Peel said he felt he was hired because the BBC "had no real idea what they were doing so they had to take people off the pirate ships because there wasn't anybody else". Peel presented a programme called Top Gear. At first he was obliged to share presentation duties with other DJs (Pete Drummond and Tommy Vance were among his co-hosts) but in February 1968 he was given sole charge of Top Gear. He presented the show until it ended in 1975. In 1969, after hosting a trailer for a BBC programme on VD on his Night Ride programme, Peel received significant media attention because he divulged on air that he had suffered from a sexually transmitted disease earlier that year. This .... Discover the Sarah Peel popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sarah Peel books.