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This column does go on about John Peel, I know, I know. And I apologise but I'm going to have to go on about him again.
The reason for this is that 6 Music managed to dig out some recordings of The Perfumed Garden, the show that made his reputation once and for all.
This being the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, FM broadcasting was unavailable and the show had been recorded by a contemporary listener on what sounded like wax cylinders, while Peel broadcast his show from a spaceship 60 million miles away, through an ion storm guaranteed to compromise sound quality.
Actually, I don't give a monkey's about sound quality, and hold firmly to the belief that a good song is a good song whether you hear it on state-of-the-art technology or an ancient Dansette. As Peel himself once said: "Life has surface noise."
As for The Perfumed Garden, Peel may not actually have been broadcasting from the depths of space, but he was certainly pretty far out. For those of us who came of age listening to him play the stern post-punk classics of Joy Division,...