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Get your grooves back Center your needle on the online record collection of ‘world’s oldest DJ’ by G r e g Cahill
H
e called himself “the world’s oldest DJ.” But the rock world remembers BBC disc jockey and record producer John Peel as the man who introduced the world to Roxy Music, the Smiths, Pulp and the Sex Pistols, among others. Since May, eight years after his death at age 65, rock fans have had a chance to tap a small portion of Peel’s massive record collection of 25,000 vinyl albums and 40,000 vinyl singles, as well as rare studio sessions, radio shows, personal notes, an extensive photo gallery and filmed interviews. The ambitious pilot project for John Peel’s Record Archive, an interactive online library that is quite unlike anything else on the Internet, is a treasure trove of pop and a testament to a man who spent 40 years on BBC radio romancing his passion for new music. Through October, you’ll have a chance to explore the archive—on which 100 albums are being uploaded each month—via a clever, virtual tour of Peel’s home studio that allows visitors to click onto his mixing board, radio cassette player and other items in the room to read and hear items in the
collection. But the most impressive features are shelves stocked with images of thousands of record albums that line the walls. You can browse the albums by rolling over the spines with a mouse and then clicking on an album to “pull” it out of the collection and listen on a streaming music player (either Spotify or iTunes). You can even look at Peel’s handwritten notes jotted on the album dust jackets. And though you can’t actually download the music directly from the archive, the interactive experience is akin to visiting Peel’s studio and spinning a disc from his private record collection. The project is being paid for with grants from the British Lottery Fund and Arts Council England. The interactive archive is hosted by the performance-arts website known as the Space (thespace.org). Plans call for the online archive to continue growing until all of the material is uploaded. Tom Barker, director of the John Peel Centre for Creative Arts, writing earlier this year on the John Peel Radio Blog, expressed hope that the 26-week pilot project is just
In 1997, the Guardian UK asked John Peel to name his 20 favorite albums. On the list were ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico,’ PJ Harvey’s ‘Dry’ and, at No. 1, Captain Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica.’
the beginning. “Because of the tight timescales and the funding only running until October, what we are doing on the Space is very much only the beginning of what we hope will be an even more exciting project,” he noted. “In the long term, and with extra funding, we hope to release the entire contents of John’s huge collection.”
And what would Peel have thought of this grand gesture in his honor? Shortly before his death, when asked to comment on the importance of new music—and, by association, his life’s work of spreading the gospel of pop—Peel grudgingly told the London-based underground publication the Metro: “Important is one of those words like interesting; it means everything and nothing. In the great scheme of things, it’s probably not important at all but, in terms of people developing their own taste and through that, their own characters, it would seem very important.” < Make Greg a mix tape at gcahill51@gmail.com.
›› SPiN OF THE WEEK Falling by Seapony (Hardly Art) The shiny ’90s dream-pop sound of Mazzy Star, and such twee bands as Talulah Gosh, shine brightly on strong follow-up to this Midwest trio’s acclaimed 2011 debut, Go With Me. Jen Weidl’s atmospheric vocals (the All Music Guide has likened her style to “a lovestruck girl singing dreamily on a walk through the park”) drift hazily above catchy reverb-saturated, fuzzed-guitar lines. This is retro jangle-pop at its best— such songs as “Be Alone,”“Fall Apart” and “See Me Cry” would have fit nicely on a college-radio playlist during the Clinton administration. The perfect complement to those lazy golden-hued days of autumn.—GC 22 PACIFIC SUN SEPTEMBER 14 - SEPTEMBER 20, 2012