Interview - for the Ken Garner book
>In Session Tonight=-
charting the history of the Radio One session>
I don=t know how my first Peel session came about. He was playing anarchic tapes then [1969], by the likes of Ron Geesin and Lol Coxhill. I know he bought a copy of my L.P. Ludo [on Parlophone] in Woolworth=s, Stowmarket for 10 shillings, not long after. He stopped playing the others eventually, but kept on playing me. When I asked him why, a couple of times, he just smiled quietly and said nothing. Maybe the Director-General forced him to.>
Jasia Reichardt of the ICA invited me at about that time to write an introduction to a show of sitting rooms they were doing. I wrote a piece called Life In A Scotch Sitting Room for the catalogue.>
After the show, I asked the late Mal Dean, of the freeform AAmazing Band@, to illustrate it. He said he would only do one picture, and I=d have to write more if I wanted more pictures. So I did that [two episodes were first broadcast as part of a Peel session on 27 February 1971]; but his work wasn=t simpatico, so I gave him some money for his trouble, but went on writing episodes, about two per annum, and performing them on stage and radio, until I had twenty. Then greatly daring, I asked Martin Honeysett to illustrate them, and he was perfect, and off I went to Methuen. I=ve done six books with him now.>
Thanks to Peel, I gained a whole new audience, to the amazement of my older fans, who find themselves among 16-to-35s in theatres, and wonder where they came from. I=ve also had fan mail and a lot of work because of the sessions, both gigs and radio. Piers Plowright of Radio 3 heard me on Peel, got in touch and I wrote thirteen plays for him. Neil Cargill got me to do six thirty-minute shows, also for Radio 3. And Andy Kershaw started playing me on his show as well.>
Lastly, I=m a member of the Noise Abatement Society and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, if you get my meaning.=