A power cut over the weekend had resulted in Peel Acres being without electricity for 18 hours (and also without water for a brief period). It seems that this made the local Anglia TV news. Listener Will Walker suggests that Peel could get hold of a diesel generator in case of future emergency, one of the sort used by council road workers that makes a thumping sound: "You can always keep it in the studio and pretend it's doing a session" he quips. This puts Peel in mind of the Shrewsbury Pumping Station 7", which he happens to have in a box upstairs. He slips an extract of it later in the show and claims that he might play it in its entirety at Fabric on Friday.
Peel mentions his forthcoming DJ set this coming Friday at Fabric. He asks for the listeners' help in identifying a record that he'd played earlier in the year so he can include it in his set. It was some kind of 'dance' record with a classical / orchestral theme. Sadly, it seems no listener comes to his assistance - "the only emails that are coming through are about sex with animals and I think at my stage in life, I'm not really going to get into that to be honest."
The Stylus track is dedicated to George Best who at the time of broadcast had just undergone a liver transplant in a London hospital [1].
After playing a Bridget St John track the previous week (25 July 2002), Peel mops up some subsequent email correspondence about her and tells the story of a gig in Sunderland.
Peel sums up Dandelion Records as "artistically and aesthetically satisfactory, but economically a disaster."
Mary Anne Hobbs had been to see the Sex Pistols at the weekend. Peel relates how he drove up to Derby to attend one of their gigs (presumably the second date of the Anarchy In The UK tour, 4th December 1976), only to find a hand-written note on the door of the venue saying that the gig was cancelled. JP: "And I thought that was more punk really, and more Sex Pistols as they were then than it would have been to have actually gone in to see them play... It just seemed more in the spirit of the age not to see them."
JP: "I have to tell you, I've had a weekend of such ineffable weirdness that to try and describe it to you would - you'd think I was making most of it up actually, so I'll not even bother. But details may unfold as the programme does. But mainly I shall just stick to playing records I think."
Romina Cohn: I Want To Be The Residents (12") International Deejay Gigolo
JP: "Not quite sure why I played that, but I was looking for something else and came across it and thought I'd like to hear it. And I thought you might like to hear it as well."
JP: "How irritating is it that the best track that the White Stripes have ever made was recorded for Lammo's programme? I am so pissed off about that. This is it:"
JP: "We've had - according to Louise anyway, I've not seen any of them - loads of emails about the EP by the Shrewsbury Pumping Station... It is one of those records (that) people do genuinely occasionally request. I'm not going to play you the whole thing because I don't want to whip you into an absolute frenzy, we don't want rioting and things like that."