JOHN PEEL’S PERFUMED GARDEN

August 14, 1967

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On August 14, 1967 at 5:30 AM, John Peel signed of for the final broadcast of his psychedelic radio show, The Perfumed Garden. Ten hours later, Radio London, the pirate radio station that broadcast The Perfumed Garden, would sign off the air for good. Radio London was one of a handful of rogue radio stations that attempted to thwart conventional U.K. radio programming being broadcast on the BBC by paying for advertisers and thus having the freedom to play ANYTHING they wanted. The signal from the boat was fairly weak and depending where you were in greater England, you would inevitably pick up a frequency “whine” while listening on the AM band.

John Peel is a most likely a legend to most people who would have stumbled upon this website. His contribution to Rock & Roll is incredible and his knowledge and insights are arguably unsurpassed. By the summer of 1967, Peel had already been to America for months on end, so his U.K. radio broadcasts included amazing selections of (then) obscure acts from both the U.K. and U.S. of A. Most of the 45’s of bands he played during 1967 are now insanely rare and sought out by collectors throughout the world.

Although Peel leaned highly on the psychedelic genre for his play lists, he also included many critical blues and folk staples to round out the sound. The play list for his final 5 ½ hour show is staggering. Definitely the stuff of legend for psychedelic music enthusiasts.

John Peel may have been cursed with a monotone voice, but his insights into the music of this period are truly amazing and riveting. In numerous instances, Peel referred to the contemporary music he was playing with the same insights that only “music historians” were to obtain 35 years later. He recognized that his “here and now” was unique, important and ground-breaking. He was cutting edge in the truest sense of the phrase and the world should be tremendously thankful that the BBC gave him a chance to further his career a few months later in 1968. Although they “watered him down” a bit, even his Top Gear Sessions were still mind boggling regarding what he played on the air. Top Gear spawned the “Peel Sessions” which brought countless bands into the limelight for decades to come.

In 1997 I was presented with a raw set of tapes featuring the first two hours of Peel’s final Perfumed Garden show. These weren’t incredible rare, and the quality was disappointingly poor. Unfortunately that ever present Radio London “whine” marred the tape to the point of not being very enjoyable even though the worlds best music was being played. So I set upon the task of finding high fidelity upgrades of all the songs he played and inserted them between his original dialogue in the proper slots. This was done on a 4-track cassette machine and took an enormous amount of time to produce a final 2 hour version. I offered this as a two-cassette set to the U-SPACES group in early 1998. In retrospect, the fidelity of this remix was pretty darn good, given the equipment.

In 2002, I met Guy Brown, through the luck of an internet search. He stumbled on my web page and was amazed to report to me that he had performed an almost identical remix project, using original reel to reel tape he had recorded himself while listening to the final show. Unfortunately at some point early on, he had condensed the full 5 ½ hour show into about two hours, and had not retained the original reels. His two hour condensed version only included about 30 minutes of additional music and dialogue that was not on my U-SPACES version. But Guy had produced his version using computer software, so the fidelity was slightly better and MUCH easier to edit.

So we decided to pool our resources and set out on the job of locating the entire show and resurrecting it from the grave. The first critical piece was to obtain the full playlist for the show, published in a volume of MOJO magazine. Although the list had a few errors, it proved to be invaluable as we pieced together the various bits & pieces that we had.

Then I located Gary Pfeifer who had an additional 2 ½ hours of the show that we didn’t have. At this point, since we had the original play list, we decided to just include the songs in the correct order (for the missing 30 minutes), minus the missing Peel dialogue, with the hope of locating it “someday” and releasing the definitive version. For now however, Guy has mastered 5 extraordinary CD’s in the original play order with approximately 90% of John Peel’s original dialogue in tact. Tracking down hi fidelity upgrades of the remaining songs in the playlist proved to be a challenge, but with the exception of one or two songs, we accomplished what seemed impossible a few years earlier.

So this 5 CD set is now available to the U-SPACES Group.

To get copies of this series (through trade), contact the U-SPACES project coordinator: WritingEd@aol.com

For artwork downloads for this series, click >>>> HERE

Thanks to all who made this project possible and if anyone has the entire 5 ½ hour broadcast or thinks they may have any of the missing pieces, PLEASE e-mail U-SPACES!

Playlists for ALL the John Peel CD’s can be viewed HERE.

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