It’s always a surprise to hear John Peel’s voice. You’ll be minding your own business, queuing up a song, one of the fabled Peel Sessions, and usddenly his friendly, bullshit free tones will shatter the air. And not shatter in a bad way. Peel wasn’t a radio DJ, or an entertainer. He was a friend you never met with strange and interesting taste in music, who lived in your radio. He happily pottered through his life, where you were never more than an hour or two away from The Fall.

I grew up knowing that I could always listen to him, five nights a week on radio 1. Sometimes at 10pm, sometimes 11. Occasionally at midnight. Often I didn’t. I had to go to work, or I had to go out, or just preferred to listen to something else, but he was always there. Peel was the gateway to a different aural world : through him I found The Orb. I put on the radio at about 12.40 one night, doing my tedious homework, to hear a strange and unusual sound. Chattering birds and spectral, barely present synths. It was “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre of The Ultraworld”.

“And in session tonight…” he announces like a ghost at some point of each of these two posthumous releases from a departed band. Pulp’s Peel Sessions is a clear and present winner (over Gene) in the value stakes of the two : with four separate studios set from 1981 to 2001 and at least four unreleased songs. The early 1981 session is an incongruous oddity that sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the disc – being, as it was, the sound of 4 teenagers faking their way through a studio for the time. The next session, from 1993, sees an established, unrecognisable band. The Pulp we know and if your ears have any taste, love. The brilliant, witty, and otherworldly sexual adventurers whose currency was suburban perversion and class war, with sharp suits and chunky faux-retro synths.

Even now, who can’t listen to “Common People” and feel that it is utterly, incredibly NOW? Even though the song is now, surprisingly 13 years old. The two middle sessions offer the band at the cusp of their fame – just before they filled arenas and had number 1 albums. In many ways this fame was their ruin, with cocaine and free sex, and The Daily Mirror trying to get teenage plants to entrap the band in hysterical, and hypocritical, imaginary drugs deals. Here, just before they recorded “Different Class”, the embryonic versions of “Common People” and “Pencil Skirt” show just how different fate could have been in the band had tipped slightly to a different angle.

The final session, from 2001, shows a very different group : one that have been through it and spat out the other side.The organic, human, earthy material such as the climatic “Sunrise”, and the stubborn “Weeds” demonstrate clearly that even when Pulp weren’t moving, they were always Moving : aiming for something new, something different, exploring the world outside your window. Even if the major unreleased song from this period “Duck Diving”, is an unessential but fascinating look into the world Pulp made near the end of their life.

Disc Two offers a concise experience – with a concert disc taken from excerpts of three separate shows sequenced to sound like one complete evening with Sheffield’s finest : two from 2001, and one from 1995, that are chosen, seemingly to provide as wide a selection of songs as possible. In many ways, the 2001 material is easily the most compelling, even if just through the virtue of it’s completeness : all the major hits are here and executed with a precision bordering on genius : the disc climaxes in a unusually reshaped, semi-Krautrock style version of – you guessed it – “Common People”, which is no less as exciting, vital, and original than the Number 2 Hit Single from a decade ago.

Overall, “Pulp : Peel Sessions” is an fabulous book end to Pulp’s career, and a fitting tribute to the exemplary good taste of Britains favourite Rock Uncle. Without the Peel Sessions, our world would be smaller and far less interesting.

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