First published inSounds, 21 May 1977

There is no need to ask where John Peel was in the summer of love. Anybody with enough brain-cells left to recall the era will know that it was Peel who provided the soundtrack. Peel’s programme “The Perfumed Garden”, broadcast on the pirate station Radio London, was the chrome-plated megaphone of destiny for the anthems, spaced-out idealism and trippy fantasies which were thrown hotch-potch into the melting pot of the “psychedelic revolution,” nourishing countless febrile, drug-addled imaginations in joss-stick fragranced bedsits and suburban bedrooms up and down the country.

Peel was well-qualified to be at the helm. As a disc-jockey at San Bernadino—a nerve-jarring 30-minute drive down the freeway from Los Angeles—he had been in at the ground floor of hippiedom. He had smoked exhilarating substances and incorporated the Doors, Love, and Paul Butterfield album cuts into his radio programme as one of the progenitors of what would come to be known as “FM Programming”; he had seen Capt. Beefheart at the Whiskey A Go Go, and sat in on the recording sessions for the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, and—true to the spirit of the times—he had eventually been forced to flee from California with the police on his tail as a result of allegedly having sexual relations with a girl under 18: an “offence” which counts as statutory rape.

Back in England, John had landed a job on the pirate Radio London, on the grounds of his radio experience in California and the fact that one of the station’s advertising managers lived next door to his mum, hosting a Top-40 show by day and the 12.00 till 2.00 spot by night. When he realised that nobody in the Radio London offices was listening, and that the rest of the crew were upstairs busy getting pissed or watching blue movies; Peel quietly began to do away with the established format for the late show, playing album tracks by Pink Floyd and Hendrix, reading listeners’ letters and poems instead of the news and weather and dispensing with the advertisements altogether.

Thus were the seeds of the Perfumed Garden planted. “To listen to one of those programmes now, people would probably find them laughable,” says John. “But I wouldn’t. I believed in it all passionately. I really felt we were in a position to change the world, and that it would come about as a result of my playing Hendrix and Country Joe records on the radio. I’ve still got an awful lot of the letters that were sent to me and I read them from time to time and it’s obvious from them that we all believed in it; there was no cynicism involved at all—just a very strong sense of idealism and optimism. I suppose there must have been opportunism too at some level, people taking advantage of the situation to make a few bob, but I wasn’t aware of it and nor were the people I corresponded with.”

Peel saw the prevailing cultural madness as a heaven-sent opportunity to break from the middle-class, public-school background which had always plagued him. “But in a sense I could never fully do that; I would always hold back a bit. I only took acid once, for example, when everybody else seemed to be taking it for breakfast, launch and tea. I used to smoke quite a lot, but I’m a very practical bloke in a way and I found that if I did radio programmes when I was stoned they always sounded terrible; the record would end, “Wow, man—that’s rilly beautiful…” It sounded great to me but terrible to everybody else. It was a lot easier to do them straight really…”

The Perfumed Garden made him a celebrity of sorts. By the time Radio London finally went off the air he was receiving 10 times more mail than the rest of the station’s jocks put together and being called upon to preside as master of ceremonies and cheerleader at the tribal gatherings, happening implosions, explosions, and counter-cultural shenanigans which marked the era. “It was very fashionable to be me for a while,” he recalls. “I found it gratifying to my ego at first, but eventually it became rather an embarrassment. I’d go off to universities to do lectures and gigs and the social secretary would come in, clear-eyed and obviously very straight and say hello to the groovy DJ in the corner and immediately be stoned, saying ‘Wow, man, can’t get it together, it’s this Korean Blue…’—that sort of thing.

“It was very difficult for me because I realised that I was essentially a fraud. I believed—perhaps more strongly than most people involved—that things were changing, and yet I knew that I was too conservative by nature; I stand on the sidelines and watch. I did go to Grosvenor Square and chuck stones at a blue-rinsed American matron outside the Europa hotel; I went on the Oz marches and testified at the trial and so forth, but I couldn’t see myself actually manning the barricades if it ever came down to it.” It never did. The revolution was canceled after all, although the fact that John Peel ended up on the BBC shows that the era which spawned him at least created ripples if not the waves everybody expected. John refuses to look back on those years as a folly and a waste, although subsequent events have done much to shatter his naivety.

“The thing I like about rock music is the radical changes that happen every seven or eight years; that moment when you suddenly wake up one morning and everything looks different. It happened when I heard my first Little Richard record, and then when I heard Country Joe and Hendrix. Now it’s happening again with the Damned and people like that. Music has been through a rather boring patch, but I think it’s getting exciting again now. People say to me now why don’t I play more Dead, Airplane, and Country Joe records; I still like all that, but somehow it doesn’t seem as important anymore… ”

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