The Faces - John Peel Show, England 1970-06-25 FM (Bootleg)

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Bitrate: 320
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FM Broadcast

The Faces were Peel’s favourite band in the first half of the 1970s and he appears to have enjoyed their goodtime approach both musically and socially. As well as “playing” mandolin with the band on Top Of The Pops in 1971, the DJ invited them all to his wedding three years later. In subsequent decades, he continued to cite the Faces’s April 1973 gig at Sunderland Locarno as the best he ever attended.

In 1987, Peel discussed the special attraction of The Faces for him with producer John Walters in the third programme of the Peeling Back The Years series:

Faces - German Single 1970

JW: One band that we have not mentioned in this pre-punk programme that were great favourites of yours and certainly brought you back quite sensibly to good old rock and roller’s enjoyment – and that was the Faces ... They were a band of lads. They’d been the Small Faces, Rod the Mod, all people that were seen – and I remember this very clearly because time changes – in the early ‘70s they were all seen as played out, frankly.

JP: Yes, yes.

JW: “No, not that lot again!”

JP: Well, that was very much my attitude. But as I say, I met them and you and my wife at around the same time – all people with very different attitudes to mine, much more realistic attitudes I think than I had. And I met the Faces backstage at a gig in Newcastle City Hall. And I can’t remember who else was on the bill – I think the Nice were, oddly enough. But anyway, they had a dressing room and I was sitting in – I didn’t have a dressing room – and there was a phone booth backstage and I was sitting in that thinking beautiful thoughts. I mean, genuinely thinking beautiful thoughts, in as far as I was capable of doing that. 

John Peel's Rare Album - Front Cover 1970

And they came and flung the door open and said, “Hello, John, mate, how’s it going, squire?” You know, “Come on, let’s have a drink.” And I didn’t drink at the time at all. And as they went away, my first reaction was, “Dear, oh dear, what dreadful rowdy people.” And then I saw them disappear into their dressing room that was full of scantily clad women and so forth and the sound of breaking glass and curries being flung against walls and so on, and I thought to myself, “Actually, these people are having a much better time than I am,” you know.

JW: So that rather implies that you were attracted socially as a bit of relief. What about the musical side?

JP: Well, because it was – I mean, the music exactly defined the band, you know. There was no sort of pretence in there at all. And I suppose I just got fed up – and as I say, it came about at the same time as I started to work regularly with you and meeting the pig, whose background was vastly different to mine, and as I say, much more rooted in reality. And I just, the Faces for me recaptured the kind of feelings I’d had when I first Little Richard and people like that and Jerry Lee Lewis, in the same way as the Undertones were to a few years later.

Japan Single 1970

John Peel's Archive Things Album, BBC 1970
An LP entitled John Peel's Archive Things was issued by BBC Records in 1970, with a selection of the most popular archive tracks he had played during the show's run, and sleevenotes in which he expressed an enthusiasm for a free-form radio format in which anything might happen. But Peel never again presented such an adventurous programme; the BBC's tight programming schedules made free-form radio impossible and most of the American "underground" FM radio stations which had introduced such open formats gradually turned into commercial stations playing "album-oriented rock". A 1970 article in International Times on censorship in the BBC even suggested that Peel was now working under a "special contract", which forbade him from expressing his opinions on non-musical matters during his shows.

According to Ken Garner's The Peel Sessions , Peel's Night Ride show grew out of an idea by producer John Muir for a "non-needletime" programme drawing on the BBC's store of archive recordings from around the world. This meant that not only were the shows cheaper to produce, but that they also reflected the hippy era's growing interest in exotic cultures.

Faces Billboard November 1970
(open picture in a NEW WINDOW for 100% size)

As Peel remarks in the album notes, there was a positive audience response to some of the "Archive Things", as he called them, so a selection of the most popular pieces appears on the LP. However, Night Ride ended in autumn 1969 and this album was issued in the following year, so there was little chance of it finding airplay on other, more conventional Radio One programmes. In 1970 BBC Records was a small-scale, non-commercial enterprise which did not publicise its releases to any great extent, and "world music" as a popular genre did not exist; so the LP was condemned to obscurity.

The LP was enthusiastically reviewed by Richard Williams in Melody Maker (clipping from grang354 collection - date unknown). Williams claimed that Night Ride "was vastly more adventurous and far more rewarding than Top Gear, because it took us into new, unfamiliar realms of music which, like travel, truly broadened the mind". The album "teaches us the international communication and universal beauty of music, and in many cases it provides clues to music's earliest history. Anybody who can see beyond Cream/Taste/Zeppelin can't fail to enjoy it, and get something out of it"

Peel himself commented on the release of the album in his column for Disc & Music Echo of 1970-06-20 (many thanks to Peel Mailing List member Mick for this information): "If you can recall the Wednesday "Night Ride" I used to help with, then you'll remember the curious things from the BBC archives that were played. Some of the best are gathered together on BBC Radio Enterprises REC 68M which will be easily as hard to get hold of as the "Top Gear" LP was. It's called "Archive Things" and is quite a laugh--brings back memories of a programme that I still miss a lot."

Faces 
June 25, 1970
Paris Theatre
London, England
FM Broadcast  

01. You're My Girl (I Don't Want To Discuss It)  06:17
02. Wicked Messenger  04:18
03. Devotion  06:27
04. It's All Over Now  08:18
05. I Feel So Good  08:39

Bonus Show:
Faces
BBC Transcription Pre-Fm reels
John Peel Sunday Concert
Paris Cinema, London, England 
May 13th 1971

01. You're My Girl (I Don't Want To Discuss It)  12:11
02. Love In Vain  08:26 
03. Bad N' Ruin   05:45
04. It's All Over Now  06:53
05. Had Me A Real Good Time  07:05
06. (I Know) I'm Losing You  06:30

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