Author(s): John Peel

Music

John Peel is best known for his four decades of radio broadcasting. His Radio 1 shows pretty much defined popular culture as it emerged and shaped the taste of successive generations of music lovers. His Radio 4 show, Home Truths, became required listening for millions. But all the while, Peel was also committing his laconic brilliance to paper, in articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines, his diaries and his letters. Now for the first time, these writings have been brought together. Selected by his wife, Sheila, and his four children, these writings amount to a second autobiography, telling the John Peel story as it happened. From his earliest journalism - and, as Peel admitted in the original synopsis of his autobiography: 'starting with crap pieces (opportunities for hilarious quotes from same "clouds are poems written in the sky")', he also wrote contributions for International Times, Oz, Gandalf's Garden and Disc and Music Echo, then Sounds, the Observer, the Independent, Radio Times and he was even briefly a correspondent for Bike magazine.Woven through these pieces are Peel's diary entries, letters and personal reflections from his family who are the subject of so many of them. This extraordinary, hilarious and moving book is a reminder of just why John Peel remains a truly great Briton and how much we still miss him... Author Biography: John Peel was born the day before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. His 38-year career as a radio DJ is the stuff of legend and the bands he went on to discover too numerous to mention, though David Bowie, Roxy Music, T Rex, Genesis, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Radiohead and the White Stripes would do as a start. He lived in Suffolk with his wife Sheila and their children William, Thomas, Alexandra and Florence, plus various dogs and cats, until his death in October 2004.