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 calling him 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. Peel wrote a column, also
The Perfumed Garden, for the underground newspaper the
International Times, from August 1966 to April 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 media attention because he divulged on air that he had suffered from a
sexually transmitted disease earlier that year. This admission was later raised when he appeared as a defence witness in the 1971
Oz obscenity trial. The
Night Ride programme, advertised by the BBC as an exploration of words and music, seemed to take up from where
The Perfumed Garden had left off. It featured rock, folk, blues, classical and electronic music. A unique feature of the programme was the inclusion of tracks, mostly of exotic non-Western music, drawn from the
BBC Sound Archive; the most popular of these were gathered on a BBC Records LP, ''John Peel's Archive Things
(1970). In his sleeve notes to the LP, Peel calls the free-form nature of Night Ride
his preferred radio format. Night Ride'' also featured poetry readings and numerous interviews with a wide range of guests, including his friends
Marc Bolan, journalist and musician
Mick Farren, poet Pete Roche, singer-songwriter
Bridget St John and stars such as
the Byrds, the Rolling Stones and
John Lennon and
Yoko Ono. The programme captured much of the creative activity of the underground scene. Its anti-establishment stance and unpredictability, however, did not find approval with the BBC hierarchy and it ended in September 1969 after 18 months.
Punk era Peel's enthusiasm for music outside the mainstream occasionally brought him into conflict with the Radio 1 hierarchy. On one occasion, the station controller
Derek Chinnery contacted
John Walters and asked him to confirm that the show was not playing any
punk, which he (Chinnery) had read about in the press and of which he disapproved. Chinnery was evidently somewhat surprised by Walters' reply that in recent weeks they had been playing little else. In a 1990 interview, Peel recalled his 1976 discovery of the first album by New York punk band the
Ramones as a seminal event, In 1979, Peel stated: "They leave you to get on with it. I'm paid money by the BBC not to go off and work for a commercial radio station ... I wouldn't want to go to one anyway, because they wouldn't let me do what the BBC let me do." , Suffolk Peel's reputation as an important DJ who broke unsigned acts into the mainstream was such that young hopefuls sent him an enormous number of records, CDs, and tapes. When he returned home from a three-week holiday at the end of 1986 there were 173 LPs, 91 12"s and 179 7"s waiting for him. In 1983 Alan Melina and Jeff Chegwin, the music publishers for unsigned artist
Billy Bragg, drove to the Radio 1 studios with a mushroom
biryani and a copy of his record after hearing Peel mention that he was hungry; the subsequent airplay launched Billy Bragg's career. In addition to his Radio 1 show, Peel broadcast as a disc jockey on the
BBC World Service, on the
British Forces Broadcasting Service (''John Peel's Music on BFBS'') for 30 years,
VPRO Radio3 in the Netherlands,
YLE Radio Mafia in Finland,
Ö3 in Austria (Nachtexpress), and on Radio 4U, Radio Eins (Peel ...), and
Radio Bremen (Ritz). Peel was an occasional presenter of
Top of the Pops on BBC1 from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s, and in particular from 1982 to 1987 when he appeared regularly. In 1971 he appeared not as presenter but performer, alongside
Rod Stewart and the Faces, pretending to play
mandolin on "
Maggie May". He often presented the BBC's television coverage of music events, notably the
Glastonbury Festival. From 26 September to 31 October 1987, Peel produced a six-part radio series on
BBC Radio 1 called
Peeling Back the Years. In it, he discussed his life and career at length with his long-time producer John Walters and also played some of his favorite records. The show's theme music was "
Blue Tango" by
Ray Martin which, Peel revealed, was the first record he ever bought.
Later years Between 1995 and 1997, Peel presented
Offspring, a show about children, on
BBC Radio 4. In 1998,
Offspring grew into the magazine-style documentary show
Home Truths. When he took on the job presenting the programme, which was about everyday life in British families, Peel requested that it be free from celebrities, as he found real-life stories more entertaining.
Home Truths was described by occasional stand-in presenter
John Walters as being "about people who had refrigerators called Renfrewshire". Peel also made regular contributions to BBC Two's humorous look at the irritations of modern life
Grumpy Old Men. His only appearances in an acting role in film or television were in
Harry Enfield's
Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era as John Past Bedtime, and in 1999 as a "grumpy old man who catalogues records" in the film
Five Seconds to Spare. However, he had provided narration for others. studio, 1997 He appeared as a celebrity guest on a number of TV shows, including
This Is Your Life (1996, BBC),
Travels With My Camera (1996,
Channel 4 TV) and
Going Home (2002,
ITV TV), and presented the 1997 Channel 4 series
Classic Trains. He was also in demand as a voice-over artist for television documentaries, such as BBC One's
A Life of Grime. In April 2003, the publishers
Transworld successfully wooed Peel with a package worth £1.5 million for his autobiography, having placed an advert in a national newspaper aimed only at Peel. Unfinished at the time of his death, it was completed by Sheila and journalist Ryan Gilbey. It was published in October 2005 under the title
Margrave of the Marshes. A collection of Peel's miscellaneous writings,
The Olivetti Chronicles, was published in 2008. == Personal life ==