Peel back to pure musical sensations

Our radio man weighs up Peel's successors

When John Peel died, up went the cry: "Who will champion the slightly out-there, the pretty strange and the downright unlistenable?" After a decent interlude, Radio 1 announced the answer: Huw Stephens, Ras Kwame (the self-appointed "heavyweight champion of sound") and Rob da Bank. Peel played anything - rap, reggae, techno, earnest young men with guitars, scratchy 78s of music hall stars, and 1930s dance bands - as long as it interested him. So, it took three men to come close to filling his mighty DMs.

Of the three, da Bank, originally a club DJ, has most in common with Peel. Both have silly pseudonyms (Peel was born John Ravenscroft, while da Bank is Mr and Mrs Gorham's son, Robert), and both are middle-class boys doing something rebellious. John Peel? Well-spoken? Oh yes. He lapsed into the Scouse accent in later life.

Of the others, Stephens is breathless and inclined to cliche (on a visit to Liverpool, everything was "legendary"), while Kwame doesn't talk much and plays records prefaced with a jingle explaining "the next record may contain strong language, so please retune if you're easily offended". This translates as "the second line of the first verse emulates Oedipus".

None of them is Peel's equal, but they're getting the job done, more or less. For those not wholly satisfied by Radio 1's triumvirate, head to the BBC Radio Merseyside website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/radiomerseyside/) at midnight each Sunday. There they will find Roger Hill's PMS (which, depending on Hill's mood, stands for Pure Musical Sensations, Pretty Much Sorted, Post Millennial Sounds or the heavily ironic Popular Music Show), offering the welcome sound of a lugubrious Scouser playing weird music by bands with wildly improbable names.