A real golden oldie

After 37 years on air, John Peel is Radio 1's resident pensioner. Ian Burrell meets the man still considered by music's young stars to be the granddaddy of cool

John Peel walks into the room, sits down, pulls out a needle, lifts his T-shirt and injects him-self. For a moment, it's as if he has adopted the pre-interview routine of the drug-addicted rock star of the moment, Pete Doherty of The Libertines. In reality, he is treating his diabetes, a condition with which he was diagnosed three years ago after he began to complain of chronic fatigue.

"You would have thought that you would get a brief lift from it, but there's absolutely no response at all," he says of the injection. "If you stop doing it, you get quite floaty, which is obviously what young people pay good money for at the weekends, but is not a good feeling if you are trying to get on with stuff."

Diabetes hasn't stopped Peel, and neither have countless musical revolutions or the periodic cullings of presenters by the controllers of BBC Radio 1. Next week, he'll become the only pensioner on a station that targets 16- to 24-year olds as its key demographic, he has held down his job for 37 years. Meanwhile, successive generations of his contemporaries - Bob Harris, Janice Long and, more recently, Mark Radcliffe - have beaten a path to BBC Radio 2, and countless other ex-colleagues have departed for more distant broadcasting outposts.

Teenagers still listen to the show with the bedroom light out, just as many of their parents did before them. "According to audience research, we have the highest percentage of listeners under the age of 15 on the radio station, which is amazing," says Peel. "We don't do that nauseating thing of trying to be 'down with the kids'. An awful lot of people of that age are pissed off with that."

Peel says that he thinks he appeals to young people who "haven't chosen sides" and share his open-minded approach to different musical genres: "Their attitude is, 'What have you got?'" The answer to that is, one of the best record collections in the world. Peel will still play a trance record between a slice of hardcore punk and a piece of rare doo-wop. And the convenience of free bus travel hasn't made him less receptive to emerging musical trends.

This month, Peel is sharing his show with three presenters from the BBC's urban music station 1Xtra - J Da Flex, Robbo Ranx and Bailey - who play the latest in UK garage, dancehall and drum'n'bass respectively.

Bailey says that he is a Peel listener. "For anybody who's curious about different styles and wants to listen to something new, his show is the one to listen to. That's a serious amount of knowledge he's got there," he says.

Peel himself is modest about that. "My knowledge is overrated. I've never had a great memory and I'm shit on LP titles," he says. "I've never got into that collecting thing where you have to have the Norwegian pressing where the B-side is misspelt." But his love of music is undiminished, and is the key to the 869,000 audience he posted at last quarter's Rajars.

Radio 1 DJs have not always shared this enthusiasm for a good tune. Peel recalls a dinner party that he and his wife Sheila attended at the home of Noel Edmonds. "It was an excruciatingly embarrassing evening. I didn't dislike him at all, but we had absolutely nothing in common. He didn't even have a record-player in the house or any records. My wife told me a few weeks ago that his wife had said that they didn't like to keep records because they collected dust. So let that be a warning to you."

Peel also visited the home of Dave Lee Travis. "He didn't have many records either. But he had three labrador dogs in different colours."

Radio 1 is less popular than in DLT's day, but Peel is grateful that it is now more music-oriented. Asked why he has stayed at the channel so long, he says: "You can either see it as selfless dedication to public-service broadcasting, or a shocking lack of ambition - it's both of those things. What I do is ideally suited to Radio 1, and nobody has ever tried to lure me away anyway."

Unlike Home Truths, the talk-based show that he presents on Radio 4 - which he concedes "feels a bit like work" - the Radio 1 programme is essentially a leisure activity. "I've always said to my children - and it's not the advice you are supposed to give - 'Set your sights low and you won't find yourself constantly yearning for something else that you can't have'," he says.

Peel is acutely aware that many youngsters see him as the gatekeeper to a career in music. He receives, at the last count, 158 CDs a day, the majority being "demos" from young, aspiring bands. "You open the the parcels and there will be letters written in a respectable but cheeky way. You think, 'A lot of effort has gone into this apparently casual note.' You get a photograph of them standing there, trying to look hard with a fire escape or brick wall in the background," he says. "It could be our kids, and I think, 'Please be good.' When it isn't, it's actually quite difficult to take."

If a demo makes the grade, Peel will ring the band up personally to ask permission to play the music on his radio programme.

When Peel was growing up in Heswall, near Chester, there "weren't any" musical tribes and he, like every other teenager, wore the uniform of white shirt, tie, dark jacket and dark shoes. These days, he is grateful for the opportunity to wear his red skateboarding shoes. Had he wanted something as brash when he was a youth, he would "have had to fly to Tangier".

Peel professes surprise at the recognition he gets from younger colleagues - "I always think that they think I've come to fix the air conditioning" - but maybe they recognise a groundbreaker when they see one.

When Peel first started playing hip hop a generation ago, other DJs quietly warned him that he was broadcasting "the music of black criminals". Racists were unimpressed with his diverse tastes and sent him dog shit in the post. The fact that some were stupid enough to include an address with their letters ensured that they received a similar dispatch by return of post.

According to Rhys Hughes, Radio 1's executive producer for specialist music, John Peel is the station's "elder statesman, the Don Dadda". Hughes says: "In the early days, he was very much the maverick, and that's still probably true today."

But the late John Walters, Peel's former producer, put it slightly differently a few years ago: "We are in real trouble if Peel ever hits puberty."