Today (did you know that John Peel’s favourite biscuit was the fruit shortcake?)
As well as being the anniversary of various stuff (English troops occupy Acadia, Nova Scotia in 1710, Angora (Ankara) becomes Turkey’s capital in 1923, Shroud of Turin, revered by many Christians as Christ’s burial cloth, is shown by carbon-dating tests to be a fake from the Middle Ages in 1988), today is also the first John Peel Day.
As you are all aware (unless you have been living under a stone with no radio) Mr Peel is a legendary DJ who died around this time last year. Just after he died there were loads and loads of obituary programmes and in literally all of them, there was a clip of John Peel being interviewed wearing a Headbutt t-shirt. Which probably means nothing to you but quite a lot to me as that’s my mate Keith’s old band who are one of the zillions of unknown bands that John Peel endorsed. And he’s wearing it on one of those tube posters for a posthumus favourites compilation album too, but sadly Headbutt are just on the poster not the album (which would have increased their sales from about 340 to quite a lot more). Given the astounding numbers of unknown bands that he played, there’s probably a good chance that at least one Laundry customer was also in a band that was played on the radio by John Peel. Perhaps we could add it to the data that Luke is collating; 19% of Laundry customers would be interested in recycling light bulbs and 7% of Laundry customers have been played by John Peel. Incendentally, John Peel’s favourite biscuit was the fruit shortcake.