John Peel’s Shed, Harrogate Theatre Studio, February 3 and 4; Selby Town Hall, February 25 (From York Press)

John Peel’s Shed, Harrogate Theatre Studio, February 3 and 4; Selby Town Hall, February 25

9:23am Friday 3rd February 2012 in Music news and reviews By Charles Hutchinson

IN 2002, John Osborne won a competition on John Peel’s BBC Radio One show.

“He asked his audience to write one or two sentences to say why they liked his show and the best answer would receive a box of records from his shed,” recalls John.

“My winning entry was ‘Records you want to hear, played by a man who wants you to hear them’.”

It turned out Peel wanted him to hear lots of them: “He said it would be mainly be seven-inch singles but it was mainly albums, 150 of them.”

Not until eight years later did John finally complete the task of listening to all of them, a process that has led to his live show, John Peel’s Shed, which is on tour after its Edinburgh Fringe premiere last summer.

Tonight and tomorrow, in the Harrogate Theatre Studio, he will discuss assorted contents of the box, revealing the trivia uncovered by his research into the records once owned by Peel.

“At first I was just listening to them for enjoyment, but when John Peel died, I didn’t listen to any records for a while as it seemed too poignant,” says the Norwich author, radio presenter, poet and now story-telling performer.

“But suddenly when I got the chance to do a show on a very cool, very modern community radio station, FutureRadio – where they want people to come up with ideas for shows and let you book the studio for as long as you need to make your programme – I decided I wanted to do a show about these records.

“And to do it as well as possible, I listened to all of them in one stretch and that took six months, as you have to listen to some of them more than once, just because that’s the way that any radio presenter would listen to them, to make sure that you really wanted to play it on air.”

John was determined to “do something special” with Peel’s records, whether odd, old, bizarre, obscure, or whatever. He ended up making five one-hour programmes, playing as many records as he could and telling their back story from his research into the likes of Screaming Lord Sutch and Shyheim, the youngest member of Wu-Tang Clan, the hip-hop collective from Staten Island, New York.

“He’s an artist I would never have listened to otherwise,” says John, who contacted artists through MySpace and email, as well as record labels. “I would say I was doing this show and could they get in touch with me.”

Broadcast in 2010, the radio shows were subsequently made available on podcast, and it was then that the idea of doing a condensed live show was spawned.

“I was chatting with Tom Searle, who said he really liked the podcasts and would produce the show to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe if I wrote the script, so what I did was cherry-pick the best bits,” says John.

The resulting show is an ode to radio, those Peel records and anyone who has ever sought solace in wireless. Among the four records he will play are Father And Son by Oizone, a thrash metal Boyzone tribute band, and a song by Atom And His Package.

“The name sounds like it should be a punk band but it’s a one-man band: a bloke called Adam who had to retire from music when his asthma got too bad. He teaches chemistry now,” says John.

The show ends with his reflections on the death of John Peel and its impact on so many. “His biggest skill was he didn’t know how good he was,” he concludes.

Like Peel before him, John has graduated to broadcasting on BBC Radio 4, and now he is working on his third book, following up 2010’s The Newsagent’s Window and 2009’s Radio Head: Up And Down The Dial Of British Radio, both published by Simon and Schuster.

“It’s called Bring Me Sunshine, and it’s about the secrets and eccentricities of the British seaside,” says John. “The title captures the optimism but the book tells the reality of going to the seaside.”

John Peel’s Shed, Harrogate Theatre Studio, tonight and tomorrow, 7.45pm; Selby Town Hall, February 25, 8pm. Box office: Harrogate, 01423 502116; Selby, 01757 708449.