I started to listen to Margrave of the Marshes—the autobiography of John Peel—on Radio 4’s Book of the Week, but turned it off after five minutes.

It wasn’t that the book was bad, or uninteresting; it wasn’t that Michael Angelis read it badly. It was, quite simply, that the voice was wrong. The words had the structure, the pace, the timing of the legendary DJ. The delivery did not. There was a disconnect between the words and the voice, a jarring inconsistency that grated on my ears and on my heart.

John Peel was different from, and better than, the legions of radio presenters in popular music broadcasting. He was different because not only did he come across as a real, genuine person, but because he really seemed to care. He was passionate about his music, diffident about himself, and always full of humanity and warmth.

I sometimes wonder why the BBC executives who pushed his Radio 1 show later and later into the night—trying to shove it under the carpet while being unable to get rid of it altogether—didn’t like him. Partly, I think, it was his unwillingness to be turned into a spokesman for the industry machine, churning out marketable rubbish by pretty young things.

That’s not to say that he never promoted any bad bands—he was legendary for it—but there was never an agenda beyond his own love of music, of new and interesting sounds. They may also, quite simply, have been jealous: jealous of a man who accrued fame and public adoration (though he never seemed to realise it) merely through being himself, through being a good and honest man.

Listening to that broadcast, I was caught in the space between my memories and the sad, stark reality. John Peel’s autobiography was being read out on radio, and he wasn’t reading it. At that moment, it finally sank in: he wasn’t coming back. At that moment, more than anything, I wanted to hear his voice again.