Veteran BBC Broadcaster JOHN PEEL Dies At Age 65

Veteran BBC broadcaster John Peel has died at the age of 65, while on holiday in Peru, according to BBC News.

Peel, whose radio career spanned 40 years, was on a working holiday in the city of Cuzco with his wife Sheila when he suffered a heart attack.

He was BBC Radio 1's longest-serving DJ and in recent years had also presented "Home Truths" on Radio 4.

Peel's show featured the famous "John Peel sessions", in which bands —including such extreme acts as NAPALM DEATH and CARCASS — were invited to record exclusive tracks for the program in a BBC studio.

More recently, Peel wrote the introduction to "Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore", written by longtime extreme metal journalist Albert Mudrian, which revisits critical moments in the history of the grindcore and death metal genres.

In an interview with B92.net, Peel spoke about his love of extreme music. "I quite like death metal because it's just so extreme and so grotesquely tasteless," he said. "I think bad taste is quite important. You get these people who will occasionally write to the BBC and complain when I've played death metal and there was this case in America where some woman was murdered by this couple that were into black magic and Satanism but then you say, 'Well, how many people have been killed in the names of the authorised and established religions?' — a great many more. So the idea that you object to these things because they've got these silly Satanist lyrics is just nonsense I think. There was a track that even I drew the line at playing. It was quite a good track too but it was called 'Kick the Pregnant', and I thought, that's a step too far, I'm not going down that road. I quite like, you know, bad taste and so death metal is a good area for me."