Old Peel shows - the 1978 Festive Fifty

A four-cd boxset has recently been issued called "Kat's Karavan". This purports to cover John Peel's career as a DJ and is made up of tracks that he played on the radio from 1966 to 2004 and Peel comments between tracks - somehow this tries to give a feel for a John Peel show. It also comes with a booklet that I would have liked to have seen. But this package retails for the (in my view) amazing price of £34.
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What a great montage!

By contrast, some Peel fans have, over a long period of time, posted entire original Peel shows on the internet. These also cover his whole career, but are totally authentic documents. I have collected about 30 such shows over the past year and they are tremendous listening. Today I have been working through four shows from late 1978 which include the "Festive Fifty" of that year. At that time Peel just did an "all time" FF rather than the current year that he moved too (as the all-time one became rather predictable). But 1978's shows the start of the influence of punk. It is a real treat to hear four Siouxsie and the Banshees tracks in the first ten of the FF. I can still rmemeber the shock of the two SATB sessions of 1978 and the subsequent "The Scream" album - among the most profound influences on my own listening.

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When "Hong Kong Garden" came out as a single, one of my neighbours Dad refused to allow it to be played on the house stereo as it would damage it to play such noise!

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I saw SATB quite a few times over the years but nothing prepared me for the first time around 1980. I had only just started going to concerts a year or two earlier and had only seen bands like Smokie and Sutherland Brothers and Quiver! But 1978 saw myself and many of my friends really change what we listened to and we started to go and see more contemporary music (interspersed with Genesis, Rush, lots of heavy metal - a somewhat eclectic mix). Only when I got to London in 1981 did I really focus on just contemporary stuff - The Cure, New Order, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Sisters of Mercy, and so on. Happy days!

Very much how I remember her