John Peel's First-Ever Night Ride, 6th. March 1968

"This is the first of a new series of programmes in which you may hear just about anything", says JP at the start of this show, and he's not wrong.

So here we have the very first of John Peel's Night Ride shows, complete and in glorious mono. Tonight's sessions come from The Incredible String Band and Adrian Mitchell. There's also a bit of John Dunn's part of Night Ride at the end of this recording, which, to quote Peel from a later era, is in marked contrast to the one which preceded it. But despite presiding over a far more traditional selection of music himself, Dunn is fulsome with praise for Peel's show and expresses disappointment that he wasn't able to listen to it himself.

Peelie mentions that this is the first time he's been allowed to operate his own equipment for some time, I'm guessing since his Radio London days. And he does well; there's only one slight hiccup, when he forgets a song name and has to read it off the record as it spins down.

My thanks to Colin Ellis and Guy Brown for this one. Colin's recording of the show seemed to be in stereo, but it turned out to be a sort of bastardised mono, with the left channel being just a horrible, raspy echo of the right. So I've used the right channel to make a 'good' mono recording, which got rid of 95% of the noise in one fell swoop. Also, Colin's version was in two halves, and the tape flip happened right in the middle of the Incredible String Band's 9-minute epic Ducks On A Pond, which is a hell of a shame as that's quite a rarity.

This is where Guy Brown comes in, because Guy's session discs contained another recording of the session version of "Ducks". This version was also incomplete but this time it was only the end that was missing. A case of "be glad for the song has no ending (but does have a middle)", one might say. Thank you, I'm here all week.

So with a bit of slicing and dicing in Audacity I've merged in about 20 seconds from Guy's version which completes the track and the show. You'll notice the joins if you're really listening, but I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out.

I've decided to provide this one as a lossless FLAC encode. As it's mono, and only one hour long, it's not too large.

Download (167Mb, mono, FLAC, duration approx. 1 hour)

Tracklisting

• The Misunderstood - I Can Take You To The Sun
• Incredible String Band - You Get Brighter (session)
• North Vietnamese music - A Joyful Northern Air (from BBC archives)
• Adrian Mitchell - Take Stalk Between Teeth, Pull Stalk From Blossom, Throw Blossom Over Arm Towards Enemy, Lie Flat and Await Explosion (session)
• The Iron Butterfly - Possession
• Chat with Adrian Mitchell
• The End - Shades of Orange
• Incredible String Band - All Too Much For Me (session)
• Domenico Scarlatti - Sonata in E Minor (K 15, L 374) ("We'll try and get him in for the programme next week")
• Incredible String Band - Ducks On A Pond (session)
• Adrian Mitchell - To You (session)
• Adrian Mitchell - Prince of Wailers (session)
• Simon and Garfunkel - Sparrow
• Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac - Cold Black Night
• Tulana Jinjote Ragum (??) (played on veena, mridangam and tambura) (from BBC archives)
• Incredible String Band - Goodnight (session)
• Handover to John Dunn for the rest of Night Ride
• News
• The Laurie Johnson Orchestra - The Theme From Beauty Jungle
• Hank Garland Quintet - Pop Goes The Weasel (part)