Born John Robert Parker Ravenscroft in Heswall in 1939, Peel began broadcasting in the United States during the early 1960s. After returning to Britain he joined offshore pirate station Radio London in 1967, where his late-night Perfumed Garden abandoned the usual hit-led radio formula in favour of records he actually wanted people to hear.

When BBC Radio 1 launched later that year, Peel became one of its original DJs. He stayed for the rest of his life. The setting changed from pirate radio to the BBC, but the instinct survived: find something interesting, play it, and worry about categories afterwards.

That approach made him central to several musical upheavals before rave arrived. He gave space to psychedelic music, reggae, punk, post-punk, independent labels, hip-hop, extreme guitar music and artists who did not fit normal daytime programming. The famous Peel Sessions turned the programme into something more than a record show. BBC Radio 1’s own fiftieth-anniversary history records around 4,000 sessions by more than 2,000 artists between 1967 and 2004.

By the late 1980s the next rupture was happening in dance music. Peel did not suddenly become an acid-house evangelist or start talking like a club promoter. He simply treated the new records as he had treated punk or dub: if they sounded alive, they belonged on the programme. Surviving show logs place A Guy Called Gerald — Voodoo Ray on his programme in August 1988, followed by repeated plays and the first of Gerald’s Peel Sessions later that year.

That matters to rave history. In 1988 acid house was still being worked out in clubs, warehouses, bedrooms and tiny independent labels. National radio exposure was not inevitable. Peel’s programme offered a route where a record could sit next to punk, African music or noise without having to become respectable first.

As hardcore developed, the connection became impossible to miss. Altern-8 recorded their only Peel Session on 27 October 1991, broadcast on 24 November. The set included Frequency and material from the same rush of records that had made their masks, chemical suits and breakbeat sound part of rave’s public face.

Peel’s electronic trail through the 1990s was wide rather than fashionable. Aphex Twin recorded two sessions, in 1992 and 1995. Orbital recorded a 1993 session, while Peel later broadcast their 1994 Glastonbury performance and another Maida Vale appearance in 2004. Warp-linked artists including Autechre, The Black Dog, Boards of Canada, Plaid, Seefeel and Luke Vibert also passed through the programme.

For techno there are few better surviving snapshots than Jeff Mills live at Maida Vale on 19 May 1998. Mills performed a rapid live mix on Radio 1 while Peel watched from the studio. Afterward Peel described watching him work as breathtaking: uncompromising Detroit techno, live on national British radio, treated not as a novelty but as serious music worth making room for.

Jungle and drum & bass were part of that same open-door policy. Contemporary tributes to Peel specifically remembered the programme for giving early exposure to drum & bass, and his playlists and sessions kept reaching into the music as it evolved. A particularly strong late example came on 24 August 2004, when Bailey and SP:MC delivered a John Peel Session crossing Radio 1 and 1Xtra. The selection included Digital, Equinox, Hive, Kryptic Minds & Leon Switch, Photek and others.

That broadcast came only two months before Peel died suddenly from a heart attack while on a working holiday in Cusco, Peru, on 25 October 2004. He was 65. Radio 1 lost the last serving member of its original 1967 DJ line-up and underground music lost one of the very few national broadcasters whose curiosity had survived success, age and institutional comfort.

The point is not that Peel discovered every artist he played, or that scenes needed his approval. Rave culture built itself in clubs, pirate stations, record shops, bedrooms, fields and warehouses. Peel’s contribution was different. He gave some of that unruly music a national frequency without sanding the edges off first.