JOHN PEEL: I AM WHAT I PLAY

JOHN PEEL: I AM WHAT I PLAY

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Penny Valentin

There are two choices. You can either watch Top Of The Pops or you can listen to John Peel. It depends who you are ,and what you want. Both are aimed at an audience with money to spend on getting musical satisfaction. But they couldn't be further apart. Maybe if you don’t have any regular TV slot for rock, Top Of The ops could make you feel envious. Don’t. Maybe for a country with a mass of rock choices, AM and FM and all those locals, the thought of just another DJ giving you the “low-down” doesn t make you think anything. Do.

At 7:30 p.m. on Thursday night Top Of The Pops emerges like a tired plate of oatmeal. It has been on the screen for over 15 years, smugly watching various attempts to compete with it flounder and fade. As familiar—and safe—as our soap operas, it has the same aims, it looks for the same television audience. It works, perhaps even more blatantly than other programmes, on the Us and You principle. The Us are the people who make the choice for the You. For 30 minutes it screens a variety of groups picked by the Us’s as a sample of the Top 30 each week. It is fronted by a DJ from daytime radio who fits neatly into its format because it’s exactly the Same as on the airwaves. The DJ gabbles the name and title of the next group/song. It doesn’t matter that rarely can you hear what he says because each half number you hear is shot with the same camera angles, and because the format is stronger than the individual items, it neatly reduces everything to “family entertainment.” It works as a sanitizer, carefully smoothing out the chances of anything untoward happening. Just as daytime, and most evening radio rock, is formulized to be unobtrusive, to wash over its audience, a separate world coming at them, one over which they have little control, so is TOTP. It works on the principle of fostering the establishment views. Something subversive in the air? Put it into the TOTP studio where it can be safely neutralized. The Sex Pistols dug their heels in. For them to have appeared on the programme in their early days would have been to accept the unacceptable face of everything they swore they were against. (In the end they caved in, and by “Pretty Vacant” were on the show.)

The problem is that TOTP has a monopoly. The people who put it together only have to sit and wait and everyone Will come to them and they know it. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship with the music business. They can sit in the BBC Tower all day and have no contact with live music and never meet a mus'c'an if they want to. The music business tweets these demands by dispatching their promotion meq to the TOTP heirarchy; to wine and dine them. For in being a monopoly and in attracting a massive audience each week TOTP, with its rigid formula: three-quarters of its music taken directly from the Top 30 and the rest at random (based on records that, on sales figures, look like breaking in, or just a new record they like) has proven sales strength. By putting a group on that screen they insure a hit record. It’s as simple as that. They have unrivaled power in an industry where only one thing really matters—the bottom line. Naturally, they use it.

Theirs is a neat safe world. It does not pose threats. It confirms a status quo. TOTP has almost certainly never played a record by a group without a major recording contract. How could it? It is part of a corporation viewpoint and it only knows how tp keep doing what it’s doing without change by reducing everything to its lowest common denominator and keeping it there. It didn’t play punk until the music business had declared it OK by signing it up and therefore playing the game strictly to the rules—large advances et a\. TOTP and the business speak exactaly the same language.

John Peel doesn’t play by the rules. In my more paranoid moments I fancy he is allowed to do what he does five nights a week for the same corporate body as an escape valve. Whatever the reason—and after all he doesn’t come on the radio until 10 p. m. —Peel is the only DJ to move/ someway towards a two-way relationship between the listener and himself, between the musician and himself. Peel is the voice of the common spectator to rock. A lugubrious ex-hippie whose programmes once appeared to have emerged from a brbwn rice base close to Stonehenge. His producer, John Walters used to play trumpet with Alan Price. When punk started Peel’s listening figures were low, maybe that made his motivation to find something new higher than it might otherwise have been. Whatever the reasons, he was the only person who made early punk accessible to an audience who had yet to see it first hand. From then on he has retained the punk ethos in his programme and that programme’s attitude. In a way, just as TOTP could be said to reflect a small portion of

the written media on rock (The Chart) so Peel reflects the major part of the music paper, aurally. More, he hands over some of the control. He j opens the airwaves up to independent labels, small bands who’ve gone into a cheap studio and done a tape. His anti-establishment voice, allowable simply because it has proved not to be any more dangerous to the establishment than punk eventually became and because Peel’s politics are certainly not that of some rabid lefty intent on corporate harm, but more of an enthusiast for a musical ideology which eventually did nothing to stop Margaret Thatcher and her merry band of monetarists from coming into power.

Peel's, five nights a week, while not unlikely to play, for instance, a couple of tracks oTjhe new Elvis Costello album, concentrates mainly on second tier music that can find no other way to be heard through the media., Just as TOTP flows past your eyes and ears without external intrusion, so Peel will make the odd mistake, records are hit with the needle a little late, he addresses informally but without condescension an audience that knows what’s going on out there. It is a slightly older, wiser, more alert audience than the one for TOTP. It may be smaller but it’s imbued with a certain facility for thought.

Last Thursday TOTP had a promo film of the Captain and Tennille with Toni floating around a beach looking like a shampoo commercial while the good Captain was seen hard at work over his hot piano. This “message” fitted extremely well into TOTP’s gverall views (The DJ was, as usual, seen throughout surrounded by girls from the “audience,” a collection of rather respectables looking kids who are fnerely required to o foregather, back to camera, in front of various « stages to indicate a very orderly crowd who clap o on cue; the TOTP’s dancers are all young women who tonight , are dressed as „ fairies with white-rimmed sunglasses and suspenders). The UK Subs tried to attack something about the TOTP ethos with a number that included the lyrics “looking at the world through the barrel of a gun,” but despite a lot of storming and admirable—under these conditions—energy failed to break through the safety barrier. Canadian group Martha and the Muffins, a group called The Lambrettas who re-hash the Coasters “Poison Ivy” criminally and look like they’ve only just done a stint at a variety club, a promo film of Blondie looking like a Lou Reed kewpie doll come in fast order. Shakin’ Stevens looks like a pleasant chap and does a passable imitation of a young Presley on ‘‘Hot Dog” with a de rigeur girl and the edible title itself on display as a phallic symbol. Squeeze, who sound like Costello because they extend the last line of verse into the chorus are admirably polished. Only the Beat (2-Tone stablemates of The Specials) with “Hands Off She’s Mine” get close to making the tired audience move at all (after all the audience is only being used to present a realistic situation for the cameras, they are not supposed to react). Finally the DJ—and hence the TOTP hierarchy —have their money on a new record called .“Holding On” from what looked suspiciously like a bunch of aging session musicians and a token black front singer who looks unhappy and sounds like Tom Jones. A CFOSS between the Bee Gees and salsa, the record is a safe bet and the TOTP people can keep their wage packets. It is, after all, played on the programme, the natural consequence of which is that it will be in the chart next week. Such risks take your breath away.

Two hours later Peel plays a band called The Second Chance who have a tape that sounds like Costello, the Eagles and La Bamba rolled into one and then suddenly say something like “fry that hamster’’. Peel doesn’t pick up on that which is unusual. Ska’s “So Strong” is neatly ironic considering that it’s about rock radio. “The Bodies”Js an edgy little piece about genocide by Art Nouveau. Nightshift, who sound a bit like Talking Heads, had made a record themselves, cut it and sent a copy to Peel which he’d played a little while ago and then: “I gave it to the poor, but I got a most amiable letter from the band so I took it back from the poor and here it is.” Holly Baine with her own Crass records has a feverish Poly Styrene voice and a piece of realism in the shape 1 of a young woman who is pregnant “she won’t seek advice, ask any help” and who eventually dies in the street to the accompanying sound of a fading drum “heartbeat.” The Bodysnatchers are a girl group signed to the Specials’ 2-Tone label, but that’s okay because it’s a band’s label, and they have come up with “Rude. Girls” their answer to all the “rude boys” records (“rude boys don’t have it all their own way”) and is, as it should be, the kind of “answer” record that used to be so popular in the 60’s. Peel doesn’t play one chart record tonight, although Stiff Little Fingers’ new one might be in the future. His choice is eclectic'and you never quite know what, or why, you’ll hear next.

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Top of The Pops explains how punk became neutralized. It’s the BBC’s equivalent of a commercial break. Shot to preserve the distance between Us and You, keeping Us safe. Peel represepts tfie We. Though not exactly dangerous, hfe goes some way to presenting an alternative view of the world, thereby reflecting the working ethos of the musicians who you hear oh it. And you can dance to it. ^