SIDEBAR - JOHN PEEL

English nationality and a Liverpool accent facilitated John Peel's debut on American radio in 1964, when the Beatles were dominating the airwaves and winning the hearts of American teens. He worked at stations in Dallas, Texas, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and San Bernadino, California, before returning to the United Kingdom in 1967 to host his late-night, hippy-trippy Perfumed Garden on pirate Radio London. When the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) established Radio 1 in September 1967 in response to the challenge of pirate radio, Peel was one of the new network's original recruits. For more than 30 years Peel championed new and often challenging music, playing records to which a less adventurous broadcaster or less committed music enthusiast would likely not have given airtime. Yet the same breadth of taste that tested the boundaries of what could be broadcast on the BBC could also find room for a good-time group like the Faceshe famously mimed the mandolin part from Rod Stewart's Maggie May (1971) on Top of the Popsand an unlikely love affair with the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual competition sponsored by state-run European television stations to determine the best new pop song. John Pidgeon