John Peel's Record Collection to Be Preserved in Online Archive

John Peel photographed at home in Suffolk in 1991.

Alastair Indge/Photoshot/Getty Images

The British Arts Council is recreating a large portion of the late, beloved radio DJ John Peel's extensive record collection for an online museum project called The Space. "What we're hoping to do is create an online interactive museum which answers [the question of what was in Peel's collection], but also provides the audience with a visualization of it," Tom Barker, director of the John Peel Centre, told the BBC. "This is the first step in the journey of making one of the most important archives in modern music history available completely."

Peel, who died in 2004 at 65, was a DJ on BBC Radio 1 for nearly 40 years, and was famous for being at the forefront of new music, both from the United Kingdom and abroad. In that time, he amassed a collection of approximately 25,000 vinyl LPs, 40,000 vinyl singles and a vast number of CDs.

Photos: Random Notes

The online archive project will be ongoing, with the Centre planning to upload about 100 new records each week, as well as making available some of Peel's personal notes, filmed interviews and archives of his live sessions with bands.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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