Category: John Peel

Robert Wyatt :: BBC Peel Sessions II 1972-1974

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John Peel had a strong case for being the world’s foremost champion of musician Robert Wyatt. Both as an admiring fan and personal friend, the legendary BBC disc jockey was always stricken by Wyatt’s musical brilliance and singular wit. In addition to the innumerable amount of Peel Sessions with previous pioneering groups Soft Machine and Matching Mole, Wyatt’s early seventies solo sets tackle a hodgepodge from his catalogue including charmingly obtuse oddities to the Mellotron aquatic ambiance of 1974’s classic solo record Rock Bottom.

This Heat :: Made Available: John Peel Sessions

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“I get asked to play more music like This Heat, but to my knowledge there is no other music like This Heat” – John Peel

For 37 years, John Peel worked as a conduit, pulling unheard voices out of the static and setting them loose across the BBC dial. In 1977, one of those voices was This Heat, formed just a year earlier in a Camberwell rehearsal space. Frayed at the edges, with clipped rhythms pushed straight to broadcast, they didn’t sound like a band adapting to a Maida Vale studio so much as one ignoring the usual expectations of a radio session.