Home Studio

In his unfinished, posthumously published autobiography, Margrave of the Marshes, there is a photograph of John Peel "compiling the running order for his programme in his room at home". It is notable largely because of the state of the room itself, which, while an improvement on Peel's infamously squalid office at Radio 1 – where five years' worth of Christmas cards hung from the ceiling, and his office-mate Andy Kershaw was obliged to conduct his business seated on an upturned rubbish bin – still looks like total chaos. Quite aside from the pair of trainers and what appears to be a Rastafarian's tam attached to the ceiling, the problem is the CDs and the records. They are everywhere, on the shelves, in boxes, on the floor, on top of the boxes on the floor, submerging a chair, wedging the late DJ into what looks to be about two square feet of floor space. And yet, according to his widow Sheila Ravenscroft, this photograph documents the first stage in a complicated and scrupulous filing system that Peel had maintained for his record collection since 1969. "Oh, he was absolutely meticulous. Obsessive. A lot of the rest of his life was chaotic, but when it came to music, he could tell straightaway if someone had taken something and put it back in the wrong place." She smiles. "You wouldn't think so, looking at his room."

Peel's is probably the most celebrated record collection in Britain, 26,000 albums, 40,000 singles and countless CDs, which spread out of Peel's office and took over a variety of rooms and outbuildings in the home near Stowmarket he invariably referred to as Peel Acres. The singles and CDs, Ravenscroft says, were filed alphabetically, but the albums were a different matter. "They are all filed numerically and cross-referenced with a very old filing cabinet, full of small filing cards that John hand typed himself on his old Olivetti typewriter. The way you access them is that you look in the filing cabinet, find the file card alphabetically, and on the top corner there's a number."The record collection of late, legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel will soon be available to browse online, as the BBC reports. His collection of LPs will be added in increments of 100 each week from May through October at a website called the Space, run by the BBC and Arts Council England.

According to Tom Barker, director of the John Peel Centre in Suffolk, England, the virtual collection will function as "an online interactive museum." Scanned album artwork will offer a visualization of each album, some of which will be available to stream. Others will point to archives of the now iconic "Peel Sessions." Baker 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."

After serving nearly four decades at the BBC, Peel died in 2004, but his legacy as an eclectic DJ and advocate for independent, offbeat music has lived on. Peel's widow Sheila Ravenscroft told the BBC, "We're very happy that we've finally found a way to make John's amazing collection available to his fans, as he would have wanted."

John Peel suffered none of my mother's qualms in his lifetime. His vinyl collection alone amounted to 26,000 copies; their sleeves are now available for inspection online, with links where possible, accompanied by images of the cards onto which he meticulously typed the name of the artist, title and tracklisting. He was a little strange like this; on CDs, he also insisted on timing the tracks himself, rather than trusting the timings as listed on the sleeve.

Had he lived to be 265, rather than, sadly, 65, he could not possibly hope to have given these albums the solid, several times over hearing their makers naively hoped he would. Possessing them, conscientiously filing and noting them was the thing. This has been reflected in the widespread slew of praise for the undertaking of putting up the collection. What an archive. What a national treasure. What a man. What volume and diversity, obscurity and eccentricity. You do sense, however, an undeclared, silent follow-up. "Of course, none of it's the sort of thing you could ever listen to."

Peel is revered for his enthusiasm overall, rather than the objects of his enthusiasm. Much as there are faces only a mother could love, runs the suspicion, there are albums, bands, that only a Peel could love. His "wet socialist" (as Peel himself described his political views) kindliness, his love of the underdog, the eccentric, the unheralded and un-listened to, mean that dross and diamonds, like dustman and duke, jostle side by side in this vast index.