Mr Peel's show was quite unpredictable, save, in later years, for one fixture: \ufffdPig's Big 78\ufffd, halfway through. This was a 78 rpm record chosen by his wife, affectionately nicknamed Pig. The sound quality would be terrible, as no one had made such records since the late 1950s, and the ones Mr Peel played often came from much earlier than that. But the 78s were no exception to his passion for novelty. They were old enough to be new again.

[...]

Yet Mr Peel always seemed too young to be considering how he would like to die. And there was too much music to be listened to. Although it was not work to him, but sheer pleasure, he nonetheless spent hours every day listening to music he had never heard before. By the time he died\ufffdsuddenly, of a heart attack in Peru\ufffdhe had possibly listened to more music than anyone else alive. And though studios had become as computerised as the rest of the world, he continued to prefer playing vinyls on turntables. They sounded better.

He did not start his radio career at the BBC, but at WRR, in Dallas, Texas. He had been in America for two years, working as a crop-insurance agent, when the Beatles started sweeping America. His scouse accent was suddenly marketable, even if he hammed it up a bit. Although he was born just outside Liverpool, the son of a cotton broker, he went to Shrewsbury, a mid-ranking public school. He once said that his life was changed, and set on course, at Shrewsbury when he first heard Elvis Presley singing \ufffdHeartbreak Hotel\ufffd. If it had not been Elvis, it would have been some other song.