For fans disappointed that the online debut of the late John Peel’s record collection didn’t feature actual music off those platters or broadcasts by the legendary British DJ, here’s the real deal: a streaming collection of 458 episodes of Peel’s show, presumably digitized off cassettes, that totals 846 hours and spans the years 1967 to 2004.
The collection — posted to SoundCloud by a user only known as +dB from Yorkshire, England — was brought to our attention by Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, who tweeted, “What technology was invented for: 458 John Peel shows in full. Like the encyclopedia britannica of music. Dive in.”
The set, which can be streamed below is by no means complete; one of the shows from 1980 finds Peel celebrating his 800th episode, and he still had 24 years of broadcasting head of him at the time. Some of the episodes are ID’d with bands that played in session, such as Joy Division in 1979 and The Fall in 1987, but if you’re trying to track down episodes with certain in-studio performances, use Wikipedia’s List of Peel Sessions for reference.
UPDATE 9/12/12: It appears either SoundCloud or the user has removed all of the Peel episodes — but, as @keepingitpeel points out, they area all still accessible via Google’s cache, for the time being at least: “Please help us at peel.wikia.com by d/loading, these shows need to be kept and transcribed for prosperity.” To download the shows, click through to each episode’s individual SoundCloud player, at which time you’ll see a download button.
Wow!
The Wikipedia article won’t help you find the sessions though – it lists recording dates and not broadcast dates (usually 1 to 2 weeks later). You can find broadcast dates on the BBC site (even though it’s no longer being updated): http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/artists/
Good point, Frank.
Hmmm…wiki lists Pavement as 21 August 1997 and they play live on that session. Same date as listed on the Brighten the Corners re-issues.
what a shame, looks like all the files have already been taken down. managed to download a couple of them before they went away, though. i had a feeling something this awesome wouldn’t be allowed to stick around for too long.
this got shut down. might want to update. tossers!
Such a helpful comment.
The user only removed the “set” that conveniently grouped all of the shows together. The shows themselves are still online – no need to use Google cache, just use this link: http://soundcloud.com/search?q%5Bfulltext%5D=John+Peel+Show+%2BdB
It looks like +db’s account has been suspended.
I’d like to listen to the John Peel Show
September 13th, 2001
just go to
http://soundcloud.com/search and make a manual search for:
John Peel Show
John Peel Sessions
or click on this one: https://soundcloud.com/search?q=John%20Peel%20Session
https://soundcloud.com/search?q=John%20Peel%20Show
or here: https://archive.org/search.php?query=John%20Peel
https://archive.org/search