When it comes to important broadcasters, it’s hard to forget the extensive work of the late John Peel.
The iconic BBC broadcaster and DJ’s sessions have been listed and catalogued for your nostalgic pleasure.
Almost 1000 performances by artists on John Peel sessions have been collected and alphabetised online for your listening/viewing entertainment.
John Peel sadly passed away in 2004, however, his extensive radio presence now truly lives on. Peel left us with a sizeable mass of artist sessions from his time broadcasting BBCs Radio 1 show. How sizeable exactly? Well, he recorded over 4000 live sessions from over 2000 artists. While we received some official session releases in 2005, many more have been uploaded to Youtube. With these historic sessions scattered all-around online, blogger Dave Strickson seized an opportunity.
As of recent, Strickson has alphabetised and playlisted all available live session clips. This monumental task would have been straining and repetitive, to say the least, but man are we thankful. Even better, his John Peel work isn’t even done. Strickson quotes on his blog that the list is being “updated regularly”. You can suss out the currently available list here.
There’s good reason to list and collect these sessions. During his time at BBC, John Peel hosted performances by some of the most iconic rock bands and musicians, I’ll give you a few killer examples, but you should definitely check the list yourself. Through the blog, you can view sessions from David Bowie, Nirvana, The Smiths, and many more. There’s even a session with Pink Floyd’s OG frontman Syd Barrett. Discover some fascinating truths about Barrett here. Anyway, there’s plenty of sessions to indulge in, so I’ll see you on the other side.
