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Listening to Cocteau twins

My wife surprised me yesterday by saying that she still couldn’t believe it that John Peel was dead. As she had not actually heard of John Peel until she met me, that was saying something. I suppose it must have been Home Truths what done it. I had not actually heard of Daniel O’Donnell until I met my wife but I’m pretty certain that I won’t feel the same way about that gentle Irish crooner when he eventually goes to the great end-of-the-pier-in-the-sky. I am sure my wife won’t either. Having been put off the Midwich Cuckoos by the spoilers on BBC4 last week, she has expressed a desire to read Margrave Of The Marshes when I have finished it. That is not going to be long; I bought it in the local bookshop instead of any discounted place because the great-grey-behemoth that is town-and-country development these days wants to knock down the building it is housed in and put up what Charles three would call a glass stump; it will be finished in the next 24 hours.

I was very worried that Peel’s biography being started by him and finished by someone else would result in a fault-line I wouldn’t be able to get over. There are no worries on this score, his wife writes, if not in the same style as JP, with the same outlook on life and the same level of understanding of what he experienced. There was a gentle pang when I finished the first part, knowing that was the end of Peel, about this time last year but with the insertion of a letter to Tom Robinson declaring love of Sheila, the novelistic trail continues, only slightly slowed by the change of pronoun. The laugh quota per page is the same in both halves, as is the John-bursting-into-tears count and the obvious longing for family life. I left it last night with the description of his kids feeling out of touch with modern music because their dad was not there to call and ask advice of and it was sad – like Jenny Agutter calling out “daddy - My Daddy” something which gives me filmy eyes just writing it.

I’ve said before, that I didn’t listen to Peel’s show often in recent years but thinking back over it, each brief night time listen resulted in the purchase of some exquisite music which he found fit to play between the banging techno, nanosecond long death-metal tracks, and all the other un-listenable stuff which I used to pretend to like. Black-Star Liner spring to mind. None of this is anything to the hours I used to listen to Peel’s show when it came on after Kid Jensen in what must have been the late seventies and early eighties. It was only on medium wave and faded in and out as radio Moscow used to get the better of it and I am sure my uneducated ear must have found a lot of the stuff quite strange, far more than it did the last time I heard the show. There is a wonderful picture of PJ Harvey at rest between tracks for a gig played at Peel Acres, beaming at John as he comes out with an obviously bluffed tale, a real gem, like finding Ian McCulloch smiling or worse still, without his sunglasses. Rock and Roll with the back off. Read it and truly weep.