UK News 27-10-2004 John Peel, 1939-2004 who: John Peel what: Dies of heart attack on family holiday, aged 65 where: Peru when: Monday snippet: "John Peel, the seemingly ageless disc jockey and broadcaster, has died of a heart attack during a working holiday in Peru," reports The Telegraph. "Peel, a grandfather whose appeal to the young endured through almost 40 years of broadcasting on Radio 1, collapsed while he and his wife Sheila were visiting the ancient Inca city of Cuzco on Monday evening." "To music-lovers, particularly teenagers, from four generations, he was the fourth emergency service," says Caitlin Moran in The Times. "Even now, in an era of MTV2 and Radio 6, there still isn`t anywhere you can find the stuff Peel would play - a unique combination of roots reggae, Belgian gabba, progressive folk and Bogshed." "It was because of him I got to hear some of the most obscure but influential music I ever heard," says fan James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers. "He was a lifeline to hearing music I would never have heard otherwise. He was a portal to a whole new world." "He mocked himself constantly - for being short, fat and bald, for being unreasonably enthusiastic about Liverpool FC and The Fall, for supposed incompetence as disc jockey, husband and father," eulogises Robert Hanks in The Independent. "In later years, as a grateful nation showered honours on him - OBEs, Sony awards, the NME Godlike Genius award - he showed himself a sentimentalist of almost Dickensian proportions, bursting into tears at the drop of a statuette; but nobody minded..." [... more]

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