Furniture and John Peel

Jim Irvin wrote about John Peel playing Shaking Story in a 2009 piece reviewing the Kats Karavan boxset:

"In 1981 I made a record. In the spirit of the times it was a totally independent effort, recorded, designed and funded by the band, 1000 copies pressed on our own label, The Guy From Paraguay records, with a Xeroxed picture of a naked man sitting on a sofa as a sleeve. We had no idea what we were doing. Our 'fling it at the wall' philosophy was hopelessly naïve, and we finished the adventure with about 400 copies still under the drummer's bed. But, one night, John Peel played it! He segued into it from another record. I heard myself singing and I screamed. Then the phone rang. Obviously one of the band calling. I ran downstairs, snatched up the phone and yelled 'I KNOW!' into it. 'Er, hello, is Jim there?' said the unmistakable voice. It was Peel. 'I'm playing your record on the radio.' 'I know,' I choked. I wasn't expecting that. 'It's very good,' he said. 'Thank you,' I mumbled. I've forgotten the rest of the conversation. There can't have been much more, the song only lasted two and a half minutes, but I left the ground. For someone so obsessed with pop culture, the thrill was intense, unique and only bettered when somebody rang up five years later to say we had a Top 40 hit."

In later years Peel rarely played Furniture's material and did not play "Brilliant Mind". Irvin later wrote:

"As time wore on, though, youthful obeisance to Peel's nightly gumbo definitely wore off. There was a sense of bands forming specifically to get to him, of tail wagging dog. The recipe – several parts obscure, incompetent, tedious or insane to one part undeniably excellent – started to sour. I felt drabness was winning. Even on a good night his shows were patchy to the point of perversity."

Irvin also wrote a letter to Peel questioning his selection process, and received a handwritten reply:

"I once wrote him a long, impassioned letter questioning an apparently indiscriminate selection process. He sent a beautifully hand-written reply which said that he felt a duty to represent as much of the music he was sent as possible. One sensed that he was driven by something other than an aesthetic sense, being genuinely moved by the artistic impulse, by the fact that people had bothered to make a noise and then chosen him to disseminate it. It's that Peel, champion of the misfit, lover of the flawed, the mischievous, the daring and the deluded that this box salutes."

Peel plays of "Shaking Story" — 1980

— 27 September — BFBS
— 30 September — BBC (track not logged)
— 4 October — BFBS