Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1990,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a broadcaster. He's the only disc jockey to have stayed the course on

radio one. He was there when it started 22 years ago, since when he's enjoyed an uninterrupted

rain as the perceptive voice of pop.

His enthusiasm for the new and the extreme has made him the champion of several generations

of rebel from flower power through punk to hip-hop and hardcore thrash.

The eccentric public school boy who conquered his shyness

by taking to the airwaves is these days a cult figure,

upon whom age, he's 50, has conferred unwanted respectability.

He's the man of the lugubrious voice, John Peel.

John, is it unwanted the respectability?

It is really, yes.

I mean, one of the problems that I've had since becoming 50 is that because of the amount of media attention of this rather unremarkable

of hand-garnered I find that the people who listen to the program don't write to me in quite such intimate

in such an intimate way as they did previously which is rather sad I think so I'm hoping

that I'm obviously I'm only going to be 50 once and this won't happen again unless I survived to being to be a

hundred so hopefully that'll all die down and they'll start to write to me again in the

same way they did previous. But why are you still there why is it you who are the

stayer as against all those Dave Cash Simon D

Terry Wogan Ed Stewart sort of people? You were the original non-conformist but you're

...