Several friends have been kind enough to alert me to the Bonham’s auction of John Peel’s collection, which closed yesterday.
John Peel was arguably one of the most influential radio DJs of all time, and the longest serving presenter on BBC Radio (1967 to 2004). He is of particular note here, for playing Laurie Anderson’s eight and a half minute experimental song O Superman, sending the performance artist to the top of the charts briefly in 1981.
I wasn’t aware that he was a big Yoko Ono fan, but the collection features a large number of materials sent by her and Lennon. It consists of their collaborative material and her solo work, but not solo material for her husband, and certainly no Beatle items.
When the collection turns to works by other bands (almost all of them good - The Smiths, The Specials, PJ Harvey, Belle & Sebastian, The Fugees, Kate Bush, etc.) I like to see it as a lineage from Ono’s proto-punk to the punk of the Pistols and the post-punk of Joy Division.
The material includes promotional ephemera, personal postcards, vinyl test pressings, t-shirts, greeting cards, Ono's artist book Grapefruit and her classic artist Fluxus multiple Box of Smile.
Scroll through the collection at the auction house site, here:
"Around the time of the dissolution of the Beatles, when he was living with Yoko, I met them then, and you know, I used to see them from time to time. And one of those things, there are very few people actually in the whole of this history that I rather wished weren’t famous people, because I enjoyed their company a lot. But you realized you couldn’t go to the match with them or go around and have breakfast with them at the café, just because they were such celebrities life would be intolerable if you tried to do that."
- John Peel
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