2004-10-26 - 3:09 p.m.

RIP J0hn Peel. For our US comrades, he was a stereophonic disc jockey on the wireless radiogram, with a penchant for the more obscure beat combos, favouring picknose wastrels and avant garde finnish techno artistes over the satanic corporate jizz that clogs up the popular music charts, despite being in his sixties. Not that age has anything to do with taste, but he stood for something vital and underdog-y and if you can survive on a national radio station playing nothing but Nazi Bumfluff and Cartland Necrophiliac for 30 years, you have to be doing something right.

I never met the man, obviously.

At the beginning of my musical �career�, I was pretty much scrabbling around in the choking dust of anonymity, a state which coincidentally plagued the entire affair. We, the band, sent him a tape, with our best � i.e. still very shit � songs on, hoping that, like some lucky others, would be plucked from the demo pile and launched into stardom that may have reached as far as the outer boroughs of London, or the dizzying, nosebleed heights of number 38 in the Indie charts. I�d like to say that Mr Peel somehow chanced upon us, but of course this was a man with taste, and instead he got his secretary to tell someone to photocopy a note saying it �wasn�t his type of thing�, quite amazing, really, when you consider he often played industrial Hungarian goth in which pigs were slaughtered live in the studio or Japanese minimalist trance, consisting of nothing more than one note and a man hiccuping.

Of course, if he HAD liked us, I�m not sure he would have been quite the man he became � that is, reassuringly unswayed by banal, uninspired guitars and lyrics so bad you could hire them out as insect repellent.

He�ll no doubt be replaced with some mainstream lackey called Jeff Pepsi playing whatever the head of Sony has just shat into his lap.

Oh, well.