My dad used to listen to John Peel under the bedcovers when he was a teenager.

I used to listen to John Peel under the bedcovers when I was a teenager.

It wasn’t impossible to imagine that a teenaged Oliver might one day listen to John Peel under the bedcovers; but it’s not to be. He’ll have to get his kicks some other way.

Peel was one of the most fun things about the Phoenix festival I went to, forever playing records by The Fall that he had to interrupt halfway through because it was time for the next band to come on.

He called Michael Howard an “oleaginous fuckpig”, a description that has not in my view been bettered (it not only obeys, but exemplifies, Donleavy’s rule about the ideal juxtaposition of effete and vulgar language).

The Microdisney Peel Sessions are pretty much the best thing they ever recorded - Cathal Coughlan bellowing “I love you! I love you! I looove you!!!” over the play-out of Everybody Is Dead.

“He’s gone! He’s gone! He was never here. He was here. Well, where did he go?”