John Peel and Nab Woodley: A personal history
One afternoon in the summer of 2002, a group of friends and I played a game of five-a-side football in John Peel’s back garden against a team mainly comprising the Scottish band Belle and Sebastian. We were clutching small bottles of beer, but it was more competitive than you might expect. The Glaswegians have a reputation for whispered lyricism and gentle melodies but they like their football.
The pitch was between the tennis court that Peel used to joke was “paid for by Andrex” and a large shed that contained a vintage car alongside long shelves of records, some of which even the most ardent collector probably couldn’t imagine existing. It was a fine afternoon in a summer when the unexpected seemed to happen every day.
Our association with Peel ended with his death, of a heart attack while on holiday in Peru, in October 2004. But it started a while before the football match against Belle and Sebastian, and it was the catalyst for at least two tours around the British Isles and two to Serbia, a summer wasting at Peel Acres, plus countless other episodes and anecdotes that have fuelled conversations for more than a decade. Everyone seemed to have a John Peel story to share in the weeks after he died. This is ours, although it’s taken longer to get it to print.
The story started, as do all Peel stories, with an obsessive. My friend Noel, in common with anybody whose young life became absorbed by music, listened every night to Peel’s weekday radio show, specifically through the 1990s. He recorded it too, on C120 cassettes, which he played time and again on Walkman, car stereo or ghetto blaster — the machinery that fixes any such story to a narrow window in time. But it was only after email pushed out letter-writing that Noel and Peel began communicating, at the start only via messages to the studio that Peel would sometimes read out on air.
One of Peel’s regular features at that time was his annual vinyl backlog giveaway. For several years, Peel ran a competition as January approached that offered a number of winners a bundle of vinyl as a prize. Peel had mountains of it delivered daily to his front door, and although he listened to the vast majority, there were always duplicates or records for which there simply wasn’t space. The giveaway was more than just an overburdened man shedding waste: it came with a unique bonus. Peel himself would deliver the records. Winners would find not only their box of vinyl on their doorstep, but also Britain’s best loved DJ, only too happy to come in for a cup of tea on the couch.
I’m not certain for how many years Peel toured the country in a van full of records, but in late 2000, he told disappointed listeners that the competition would no longer run. He had suffered some poor health and wasn’t up to making the trip. This is the moment Noel stepped in.
Noel was one of that year’s competition winners and was left bereft by the news that Peel wouldn’t soon be ringing his doorbell. But in discussion with other friends, an idea was hatched: why not go and collect the records instead? From there, a snowball started rolling that ended with a further proposition. If there was no one able to take the records around the country, Noel said that he would. He offered his and his friends’ services as vinyl deliverymen. It was the perfect job that no careers adviser had ever thought of.
Sure enough, following an exchange of emails between Noel and Peel’s then producer, Anita Kamath, Noel and another friend, John, who had first suggested the whole thing, collected a mountain of records from an address in South London. They hit the road — alongside “fifteen crates of records, a lifetime of tapes, six mackerel tins, one of spam, two sleeping bags and two tins of rice pudding shoe-horned into the boot”. They quickly jettisoned the spam as they steered an uncertain path that led first from Kensal Rise to Dagenham, then to more glamorous environs: Handsworth and Sparkhill (“tar clouds in the sky welcome on the Midlands”), “Not Sure, Sheffield”, a night drive across the Pennines, into Lancashire, and then to Scotland. (“Where’s Edinburgh?” “Behind that tree.”) They deduced: “Staying up all night might double the length of your summer holiday.”
Noel and John’s journey took physical copies of Peel’s music to the bedrooms into which it regularly seeped. They met like minds living like lives, even though they were all completely different. They were greeted by cups of tea and bubbling chip pans; by men with mutton chops and lean-to extensions to hold music collections. There were fathers heading to collect daughters from ballet lessons; confused mums whose prizewinning sons had left for college.
“We also went to John O’Groats for no reason (nearest winner was in Glasgow),” John said many years later. “We saw whales breaching off Fort George and supped Black Isle beer in a lay-by in Nybster overlooking the North Sea. One of my fondest memories of that whole period.”
The final stop meant hopping on a plane to Knock on the west coast of Ireland, then sinking Guinness in a village named Ballina. They had the wrong phone number, and no address, for the man who had won the competition. But another local “with mud on his face and hairy ears” ensured that they would find him. “And if you don’t, what’s the mind?”
I can be so specific about the destinations Noel and John visited because they kept a delivery diary, a travelogue, that somehow ended up with me. It begins with a quote — “I’ve always maintained a car is just a big Walkman” — and then skims through the British Isles dropping non sequiturs along the way. I don’t know the travelogue’s purpose. Certainly nobody ever tried to publish it. But there was never any need for reasons nor explanations. “What do you do when you’re not delivering records?” one prize-winner asked. “Nothing,” was the reply.
This vagueness over purpose existed right from the start of what became a burgeoning correspondence with Peel. From the very beginning, Noel’s emails to the studio came from a pseudonym, “Nab Woodley”, which merged his name with that of another friend, flatmate and co-conspirator. At the outset, either one (or both) of Noel Lobley or Ben Wood would write to Peel from a shared email address, and the character of Nab Woodley grew to be regarded as a collective, embracing any one of an indefinite number of old university pals, work colleagues or strays. Peel eventually began referring to the rabble as “the Nab Woodleys”, even as he also gradually began learning real names.
The record tour of 2001 was not the last. After a year spent emailing and sometimes going along to show recordings in London, Noel and John prepared themselves for a repeat trip the following March. This time, the records they were to deliver were still in crates at Peel’s Suffolk home, a farm cottage along a narrow road, known as Peel Acres. Their delivery tour therefore began with a first dinner at the big wooden table in the flagstone kitchen at Peel Acres, adjoining one of several storerooms in and around the estate that contained shelf after shelf of tightly-packed vinyl and CDs.
In addition to the clutter of any family home, there were always heaps of records spilling into the kitchen, halls and living rooms of Peel Acres, boosted every day by the arrival of a postman hauling a couple of stiff grey sacks. Peel used to open his mail on the kitchen table, which became covered with unsteady towers of discs and a mess of accompanying press releases. Some were typed on headed paper from official A&R types, but there were many handwritten from band members themselves, who saw in Peel their best chance for a champion. It was often worth the effort: Peel was strangely susceptible to brightly decorated envelopes, glitter or any kind of proof that a band had some passion for their task. He discarded comparatively few at this earliest stage of selection, usually rising from the table with a mitt-full of music and heading through a stable door to his office.
This, in fact, was mainly another music storeroom in which he had at least one turntable and CD player, beneath a wall gallery of extraordinary photographs and knick-knacks. In pride of place was a framed scrap of paper on which was scrawled the handwritten lyrics to the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks. It was an original shard of pop history, given to Peel by Feargal Sharkey in recognition of his continued support of the band. (In accordance with an oft-stated request, the opening couplet of the song is engraved on Peel’s headstone.)
Peel spent long hours standing in front of that frame, headphones clamped over his ears, listening to the day’s new arrivals. From there, he could take a couple of sidesteps and peer into the kitchen through the top half of the stable door, where Sheila Ravenscroft, Peel’s wife, was often to be found. Peel spent every hour he could in her company, and she was a huge part of the welcoming committee at Peel Acres as the first (and all subsequent) contingents of Nab Woodleys straggled in.
Winners in 2002’s competition came from Cromer, Moseley, Warrington, Sheffield, West Boldon, Iffley, Cardiff, London and Arundel, while the travelogue morphed into a series of “Postcards from Nab” that Peel’s new producer, Louise Kattenhorn, published on the BBC website.
The internet wasn’t quite so awash with cryptic drivel-cum-genius in 2002 as it is now, but these postcards were prescient in that respect. On the front of each was a photo of the prize recipients, posing beside their records. On the rear there was an episodic monologue from “Nab Woodley” — a weary traveller sharing sudden and surreal wisdom from the road. Noel and John were still sleeping in lay-bys, still sharing tea or beer with winners, and still traversing the cross-section of John Peel’s listenership. “Winning these records has been the nicest thing to happen to him for a long while,” one recipient said, accepting the crates for her son who was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
Another prize-winner that year was a 19-year-old student from Norwich named John Osborne, whose home, in close proximity to Peel Acres, was first on the delivery manifest. Osborne didn’t even have a record player at the time, but took delivery of the records and fell under their spell. He went on to write and perform a one-man play named John Peel’s Shed, in which he described the lasting significance, the legacy, of the box of records he received.
The show was a eulogy to broadcasting, to vinyl and to John Peel’s prominence in it — “a gentle tale of one man’s passion for obscure music and the radio”, according to Chortle. He recalled the specifics of the competition too: it asked listeners to give their best two-line description of Peel’s show to be included in the BBC submission to the Sony Radio Awards jury. Osborne offered: “Records you want to hear, played by a man who wants you to hear them.” (Notably, there was no specifics of the men you might want to deliver them.) Osborne’s subsequent career as a writer and spoken-word performer offered further evidence of how a brush with Peel, however tangential, could inspire such creative pursuits.
Osborne remembered Noel and John. He told a filmmaker producing a short documentary about John Peel’s Shed: “Two guys who lived in John Peel’s village, who used to do errands for him, they came round to my house with this box of records.” This was about ten years later, so he can be forgiven for getting this origin story not exactly right. Noel lived in Birmingham at the time and John was in Cambridge. They commuted a combined 200 miles to give the impression of being “two guys who lived in John’s Peel’s village”. It also cost them a fair bit to do these errands for free.
At a similar time — the first half of 2002 — Peel received an email from a 19-year-old Serbian named Marko Radenkovic, who didn’t beat around the bush. Describing the bomb-scarred landscape of Belgrade, Marko lamented the lack of music shops in the city, as well as his lack of finances even if he could have found the outlets. One day he found himself thinking: “Who do I know who’s got a lot of records he might not want?” and realised that it was only that DJ from the UK whose show he listened to most nights. Peel read Marko’s email out on air, and admitted that he did indeed have plenty of excess records, “if only he could find a way to get them out to Serbia”. Nab Woodley swiftly reached for his passport.
The trip to Belgrade was fucking magic. It was an exceptional four or five days, during which Noel and Ben (i.e., N&B, or Nab) were joined by another friend named Matt, and me. We read up on Serbian history before we flew out. We got in touch with musicians, DJs, promoters and writers. We had a family room booked in the Hotel Splendid and packed piles and piles of records into our tatty suitcases, sacrificing any room beyond what was taken by a couple of T-shirts and some boxer shorts and pushing Lufthansa’s weight limit. We were ready to make a drop in eastern Europe to a man we had never met.
As it turned out, Marko was only the ringleader of a clutch of incredibly inspiring young people. There was also Marko’s twin brother, Uros, who was notable for a gravity-defying haircut and an obsession with the weather in cities he’d never visited. (“You know it’s windy today in Dublin.”) There was Milos, a beat-matching music fanatic with decks and a flat (his parents’) near the city centre. And then there was Milian, a habitually truanting college kid by day but a budding impresario and promoter by night, striding through the bars, radio stations and clubs, nodding at bouncers and whispering in ears, smoothing a path for Nab Woodley through Belgrade’s lawless nightlife.
This was a time of great uncertainty in Serbia. It was only three years since Nato bombs had rained onto the capital, destroying houses, embassies and sometimes their principal strategic targets. Families had been splintered as conscription-age males were sent to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in, while children became evacuees and spent months in the countryside with aunts they barely knew. Though the quality of life in Yugoslavia was better than in many communist countries (at least for the ethnic Serbs in the capital), Slobodan Milosevic’s ideology was widely despised among the young people we met. Some of them had gone to the street parties the government arranged on bridges leading into and out of Belgrade during the bombing. This had been an invitation to be a human shield. The situation was absurd.
But after the plumes of debris had cleared, and Milosevic transferred to The Hague, our young guides began to regard Belgrade as a vast blank canvas on which they could sketch out their idealistic notions. There were limited finances but infinite possibility. There were bombed-out buildings and half-finished construction projects spread across the city, all of which made ideal venues for impromptu galleries or clubs. All you needed was a socket somewhere and an extension cable, then you could set up decks and a couple of lights, buy a crate of beers for around 15p a bottle, and you were all set for the night. On that first trip, I remember going to a party in a deserted shopping mall, where they had commandeered an empty Tie Rack or some such unit. They even had a fridge to keep the drinks cold. We barely slept for five nights.
One of the most vivid memories I have is the big vinyl handover in our hotel room, on our first day in Belgrade. Marko and Uros spilled the records onto one of the beds and lay among them, like gamblers in a Vegas movie rolling in dollar bills. After hugs, handshakes and the making of loose plans for the coming days, the brothers were then faced with the prospect of getting the records home. We had a video camera with us — ostensibly to make a documentary about the trip, though we had no idea what we were doing — and we secretly pursued them down the street, filming as they dragged dead-weight suitcases of vinyl around shoppers and commuters. They hauled the cases to a tram-stop and then heaved them aboard. We’d show Peel the footage of where his records went.
The first thing we did on our return to the UK was to book a trip back. We could bring more records. We could bring more stories. We could bring more Nab Woodleys.
On the second trip, our ranks now also included old friends Simon, Neil and Helena (whose father was Serbian), as well as John, the original record deliveryman. Peel had promised us another stack of records, so once again the mules secreted the contraband anywhere they could find a space. It was worth it. During the three-month interval, Milian in particular had been busy. Not only did Noel, John and Ben have a headlining DJ slot lined up at one of Belgrade’s student clubs — where they appeared on fliers as “Nab (London)” — we also found ourselves in demand on radio shows and even Serbia’s MTV equivalent. We were the emissaries from John Peel and the BBC.
The yarn of how the records got from Peel’s reject pile to Marko’s flat in Belgrade did not get any less improbable through its repeated retelling, but the low-rent celebrity it afforded us in this tiny pocket of continental Europe was endlessly amusing. We still had our video camera rolling most of the time, filming behind-the-scenes footage of a band on tour who were not a band; DVD extras for a concert film that wouldn’t happen. One minute we’re sitting on the roof of a TV building picking Nab Woodley’s record selections for our guest appearance. The next, we’re squeezing into a lift in a Communist-era tower block, overloading it with people, shrieking as it stops between floors, goes dark, and seems for all the world about to plummet us to our rock n roll deaths.
We had also made some friends among more established artistic figures and spent time at B-92 radio station, particularly in the company of the electronic duo BelgradeYard Sound System. We had read about B-92 in Matthew Collin’s This is Serbia Calling, which told the inside story of how Belgrade’s resistance to the Milosevic regime had centred on the broadcasters at the station. BelgradeYard were an accomplished act, with a loyal following and a regular slot. They knew Peel, of course, and happily shared airtime with his strange disciples. Noel, Ben and John all played sets on the two trips.
At the same time, our literary contact was an exceptional young novelist named Vladimir Arsenijevic, whose In The Hold had been reviewed excellently across the world and extracted in The New Yorker. Arsenijevic gave our vague endeavours some genuine heft (he too knew of Peel’s significance) and introduced us to a generation of musicians, journalists and filmmakers old enough to comprehend what had befallen the country under Milosevic, but brave enough to carry on even understanding the risks.
The truth of it is that we never really delivered much of what we promised. The records reached their destination — two bulging consignments — but there was never a documentary or a book. There was just a lot of anecdotes to be told to people who may or may not be interested. That audience included both John and Sheila Ravenscroft, and sometimes their four children and partners.
By this point, we were all regular visitors to Peel Acres, engaged on yet another errand. Again Noel had got us involved in a project: Peel mentioned on air one day that his many sheds of records and CDs were in disarray and needed a spring clean. His alphabetical filing system had held up through his first 40-odd years of broadcasting, but the shelves had gone beyond creaking, through sagging and had now burst. This was troubling. Peel said he sometimes couldn’t find records he was looking for.
With humility bordering on outright fallacy, Peel described the potential challenge of sorting his record collection as onerous, an unrewarded Sisyphean task of admin. But we weren’t talking about filing documents in a office basement here. This was arguably Britain’s most extensive, exclusive and significant private music collection, a hoard of demos and releases spanning all genres of popular music through its most productive era. Besides, all of us had spent plenty of time doing mind-destroying, soul-numbing temp jobs during summer holidays. All that was missing about this one was the £6.13 per hour.
Noel recalled many years later that Peel would happily have paid for our work, and also that a BBC producer had offered some licence payer’s money to fund the record delivery tour, but it was knocked back. “Money never seemed to be the point,” Noel said.
There were other compensations. Not only did Sheila make us sandwiches for lunch, and keep tea and coffee coming all day, we also got the full pleasure of watching the Ravenscroft family do their daily pottering. In between arranging pick-ups of kids at train stations, feeding the chickens or completing other menial chores around the house, Sheila and John could both easily be led off into long reminiscences and anecdotes. It’s just that this couple’s stories featured Mark Bolan or John Lennon or Nigel from Half Man, Half Biscuit. “He never stays the night,” they said.
We tended to arrive in late morning — sometimes Peel would come and pick us up from the station — and then we’d sit around the breakfast table with a drink, watching Peel unpack his sacks of mail. As he drifted away to his record player and headphones, ready to make his first assessment of the tunes he’d received that morning, we headed into the archives to bring some order to the thousands of records that had previously survived the most punishing cut.
Filing records brings a couple of issues — there was one long chat with Peel about whether we were putting Muddy Waters under ‘M’ or ‘W’ — but in some ways the hardest part was deciding what music to listen to as we worked. The shelves were like those in Ali Baba’s record shop, and we lost count of the number of extraordinary rarities we unearthed. I particularly remember our hands shaking as we passed around a single-sided 12” promo from a new band (or newly re-named band) who now went by Joy Division. In the sleeve was a note written in crayon addressed to “John” and signed by an opportunistic promoter named Rob Gretton. No doubt theses items had arrived with as little fanfare as those still being plucked from mail sacks every morning, though they were now unique pieces of memorabilia. Their intrinsic value was multiplied many times over simply by being the copy owned by Peel. It didn’t matter that some had barely seen light since their original delivery to his stacks.
In down time, Noel and Peel spent long hours discussing music and playlists. Quite a few times, they drove up and down to London together, traversing the A12 switching cassettes, refining and broadening knowledge. Peel said more than once that he feared he’d die by swerving off the road while selecting music on his car stereo and that people would say, “At least he died doing what he loved.” He was keen to disavow the obit writers of this notion. “Can I just say I do not want to die like that,” he said.
Noel never saw Peel swerve the car off the road, but he was there once when an exhausted DJ needed few minutes shut-eye and pulled into a service station car park to fall asleep in the driver’s seat. Noel and two BBC staff ambled around the Welcome Break hoping nobody peered through the window of the car outside and noticed a national treasure sparko.
When the filing was definitely done for the day, we’d sometimes head off to Noel’s mum’s house, or back to London, but sometimes we’d stay for dinner. We also never shared Nigel from Half Man, Half Biscuit’s reticence for an overnighter. The Ravenscroft children were at university, so their rooms were empty, and we’d sometimes kip over. One evening (I actually think it was the first time I stayed) we got a curry delivered after a day of record sorting and Sheila learned, though I don’t know how, that none of us had even heard of her favourite film, let alone seen it. The title was certainly in keeping with what might be the cinematic pick of a grandmother in her 60s and we reluctantly agreed to watch it. We thought Pink Flamingos must be the one Meg Ryan film that had slipped through our net.
We learned quickly of our error. Peel fell asleep halfway through, but we all sat around watching chickens crushed, babies being sold into slavery and Divine feasting on faeces. Sheila loved it, though our hosts were both long retired for the evening by the time the film finished and we decided to head upstairs. It was only then that we found that Sheila had made a quick Egg Man delivery to each of our rooms, placing an egg beneath the duvet on each of our beds. It’s not a reference you’ll get if you’ve never seen Pink Flamingos, but if you have, yes, exactly. Chilling.
Our traipsing in and around the Ravenscroft property took us often past the family’s calendar, hanging on the kitchen wall. One day one of us noticed a new appointment scribbled in: on July 25, the words “Belle and Sebastian” had appeared. It had been a good few years since one of the downstairs rooms at Peel Acres had been converted into a studio, essentially allowing Peel to work from home. He broadcast at least one of his shows per week from there, and from 1999 had started hosting some Peel Sessions at the country retreat. We figured that this calendar date could only suggest one thing, that Belle and Sebastian were heading to Peel Acres to play. We were big fans. We just needed to figure out a convoluted cover story — maybe a record-sorting emergency — that would ensure our accidental presence in the archives that day.
Again, as it turned out, we need not have worried unduly. While we were starting to plot our method of accidentally stranding ourselves at Peel Acres in the run-up to the Belle and Sebastian show, Peel’s producer Louise approached us with a proposition. She said that Peel himself was feeling a little overawed at the prospect of hosting a band with so many members, especially as he’d never met them before. Peel wondered, Louise said, whether we might be able to hang around that day and work as unofficial go betweens, keeping the band entertained as the technicians set up the studio and the countdown to the show got under way. We played it cool. But we were amenable.
This was another one of those fortuitous gifts from that summer, further evidence that being in the right place means the right time tends to come around. It was how come we ended up playing that game of five-a-side football that sunny afternoon at Peel Acres, lining up alongside one of Peel and Sheila’s son-in-laws to take on Stuart Murdoch, Chris Geddes, et al. Hilariously, it was our appointed role. The careers adviser had failed to spot this niche too.
The whole day was pretty spectacular. The band arrived some time during the afternoon, with equipment spread across the lawn and a terrace, and familiar faces wandering into and out of the house. Clearly there were rehearsals and sound checks and important BBC matters, but I mainly remember opening small beer bottles, handing out food on paper plates, playing football and Geddes telling a joke about a weasel. For the session, the band spilled into at least three rooms in Peel’s house, with keyboards assembled in the downstairs toilet. I seem to remember cramming into Peel’s main study/studio when the band played, watching Murdoch and Sarah Martin sing from there, while the guitarists were in the library. In between songs we drank, ate and attempted to hold our own, at least until we’d opened and drained enough of the small beer bottles to mean it didn’t matter much anymore.
After the broadcast finished, I think it was Stevie Jackson who took principal responsibility for mixing and pouring white Russians. Noel recalls a cake, which we think was in celebration of drummer Richard Coburn’s birthday; John remembers a tray of identical shot glasses, much treasured by Peel, all of which bore the badge of what might have been a Polish football team. It was his once-a-decade chance to use them all. We were all clutching benignly potent cocktails when Peel led the whole rabble into his listening room and everyone got to stick on their favourite records. (They could, of course, locate them perfectly on our expertly filed shelves.) There was much singing and boozing into the night and we eventually waved the band off in the wee hours, then scurried around shoving set-lists and lyrics sheets into our pockets. I have no idea when, where or even whether we slept. We were still there the next day, though, to cement friendships through hangovers with our new rock star pals when they returned for their kit. None of Belle and Sebastian asked who we were, and no explanation was probably proffered. That marked it down as a success.
Peel too had essentially now abandoned the attempt to figure out our backgrounds and motives — though we learnt that he had been intrigued for a while. With precious little else to recommend our services, we’d always been at pains to stress our key selling points: we were always available and we didn’t ask for anything. It wasn’t a recipe for great financial success, but it was the only way any of us felt comfortable. Peel had stopped short of ever asking outright why Noel and his cohorts continued to loiter in his presence and carry out unpaid errands, but he sometimes dropped into conversation over the next few years his theories of how it had come to pass. He settled on the obvious: we had won the lottery but didn’t like to talk about it.
The truth was less glamorous. We all had jobs that we didn’t care very much about, or that allowed for sporadic attendance. I was working a night shift at a newspaper in London through a lot of that summer, which meant it was possible to do a paid shift until about 3am, grab a few hours sleep, then hop on a train to Suffolk and be at Peel Acres by about 11am, before heading back to work at about 5 or 6. Noel was doing some temping jobs at building sites and call centres; John was trapped in a basement in Cambridge, gradually losing his mind. “This whole thing was a massive release and distraction from my meagre existence at the time,” John said. Another friend Tim was also working at the paper in London, though his trips to Peel Acres usually meant not much more than sitting and talking to Sheila about their shared passion for Ipswich Town FC.
At this 15-year remove, other details are a little hazy of what happened for much of the time during and since our summer hanging around at Peel Acres. Most significantly, I can’t remember how or why we stopped going, nor whether the record-sorting job was ever properly finished. Noel ended up doing some research work for an upcoming book documenting Peel sessions; John remembers being asked by Peel who he should book for upcoming shows, and singing the praises of Lightning Bolt. “A few months later we went to Maida Vale for an outstanding gig that was broadcast live,” he said.
Even now, unlikely scraps of evidence pop up proving all of this wasn’t just a peculiar dream. Three of our faces are clearly visible in a picture gallery of Peel Sessions on the archived BBC website, while the John Peel Wiki bizarrely dedicates an entire section to Nab Woodley. Not only does this fan-site speculate that the name comes from a novel by John Waddington-Feather, it also stands as lasting memory to a chicken, named Nab, we bought as a present for Peel’s birthday one year. We had been assured it would lay blue eggs, but it did nothing of the sort. It was instead pecked to death within a couple of months, and revealed to be a male rather than female bird after all. To spell it out, Nab was an imposter. And Nab was a cock. Given his parentage, it should have been obvious.
One thing I do remember is being in the same newspaper office in London on the day the news broke that Peel had died. Thankfully Tim was there too, so someone else could empathise with how weird it was seeing the news desk go through familiar dispassionate routines when the subject of the fevered news-making was someone we both knew quite well. Noel had been trapped in a storeroom at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where he had just started graduate study in ethnomusicology, when the news broke. He emerged to a flood of messages on his phone, the first of which came from Ben, the original other Nab Woodley.
Pages of papers, magazines and blogs quickly filled with personal memories, no matter how distant the association. We sent a card to Sheila and the family, but we weren’t among the thousands who went to the funeral a few weeks later. Noel was invited, but was on tour with a band in Ireland. The rest of us were by no means close enough to warrant a pew in the church, but it would have been strange to stand outside.
Stuart Murdoch and Sarah Martin of Belle and Sebastian went, and Murdoch wrote about it in his diary, published in 2011 as The Celestial Café. “I’m sad, but happy sad,” Murdoch wrote. “It’s been a privilege to share in some small part in the life of John Peel.”
Our part was even smaller than our five-a-side football opponents’, but the feeling of privilege was much the same.
