Almost 10 years on, Mary Anne Hobbs still can't explain why she decided to give John Peel his birthday present early. It was a gift to mark his 65th: a neon sign that spelled out "Dream Dad" in hot-pink italics, commissioned from a 72-year-old craftsman from Birmingham who agreed to one last, very special job before his retirement. For Hobbs, whose own father had killed himself years earlier after a decade of depression and alcohol abuse, the older broadcaster had become an alternative, beloved father, and she wanted him to know it.
The original plan was for her to deliver the gift to Peel Acres – the Suffolk home he shared with his wife, Sheila, and their kids – when they returned from a holiday in Peru in October 2004. But Hobbs suddenly decided she couldn't wait until Peel's return. Just before he got on the plane, she corralled him into a boardroom at Radio 1. She turned off the lights, switched on the sign and "pushed him" into the pitch black room. His reaction was typically understated. "That's quite a present, Mary Anne," he said quietly, before asking if he could keep the extension lead too.
"Deciding to give him the sign before he left was the strangest thing, because he died in Peru," says Hobbs, 50, who is a DJ on BBC Radio 6 Music. As we all now know, Peel came back from Cusco in a coffin after having a heart attack, prompting Radio 1 to clear the schedules for a whole day in tribute as a nation of music lovers mourned.
Hobbs cries as she recalls the hour the pair spent afterwards in a Russian tapas bar on Great Portland Street. Peel told her how John Lennon, at the height of his fame, used to love nothing more than riding the tube right to the end of the line. "He used to love it when people got into the carriage and thought, 'My god, that guy looks just like John Lennon, but it can't be him!'" she says.
"We had the most remarkable conversation. It feels like the Last Supper to me now. It was the last time I saw him." She tries to wipe away the tears but ends up dislodging her eyeliner, before offering a superfluous apology. "Sorry. I still think it's really strange because if I'd have hung on to the plan and thought, 'no, I need to repress my feelings', he never would have seen the light and I never would have seen him that night. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to spell it out to him one last time, in giant neon letters."
She goes quiet. "He warmed every environment and brought an incredible sense of nurturing, in a very unconventional way. A lot of that was through story-telling, stories which were simultaneously disastrous and funny. Rather than sitting down and counselling you like a therapist, he would tell you a funny story."
The two had an instant connection in 1997 when Hobbs was brought into Radio 1 by the then controller Matthew Bannister as part of his purge of the Smashy and Nicey generation. They bonded over their shared love of the Scottish band Mogwai: one of Hobbs's favourite Peel stories is of him turning down an exclusive interview with Michael Stipe at Glastonbury in favour of a chat with Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite.
Such a ballsy move was typical of a man who refused to sell out, she says. "What he represented to me, in terms of everything that he stood for, over and above everything else, would be: don't sell out what you truly believe in. All the way until he died, he operated like that and I always really admired it. He's almost been sanctified for exactly that reason."
For Hobbs, family is more than just genetics. Throughout her life, from her teenage years growing up in the small town of Garstang in Lancashire, she has always sought out alternatives, or sometimes adjuncts, to her blood relatives. "It's interesting the way in which we define family, the way we put a picket fence around it. But if you look beyond those traditional borders you often find something really profound and very meaningful among people who share the same set of circumstances, the same environment," she says.
Born in Preston in 1964 to a primary school teacher mother and an agricultural engineer father, Hobbs and her younger brother and sister had an unusual upbringing. Back then, Garstang was still a village, before it grew into a town as nearby Lancaster University expanded.
The family had a menagerie of animals, including a family of three donkeys that only her mother could control. Her sister was into horses; her brother was an artist. But Mary Anne's passion was always music – a problem given that her father, a tempestuous man, refused to allow music in the house. "No one really understood why he banned music in the house," she says. "He had a bunch of 78s, and a gramophone with a big horn, but the records he had were all recordings of ancient steam trains and sounds of engineering. He wouldn't allow any contemporary music in the house on records. Obviously that didn't stop me going out and buying punk records and stashing them in my sock drawer, but invariably he would find them and smash them up. I don't understand to this day the reason why, but he didn't want it in the house."
She would gorge herself on music in secret. "I had a transistor radio the size of a sardine can. I used to listen to it lying in bed with the blankets on top of my head, scrolling the dial."
It was hearing John Peel's show on Radio 1 that opened her mind to the possibility of a life beyond Lancashire. "I remember every night trying to find the man who seemed like he had found a gateway to an alternative universe. I thought, 'He's found some sort of utopia and I need to be there.'"
Hobbs has to talk fluently for a living, but she is visibly uncomfortable and evasive when talking about her father. "My dad was a very complicated man," she says carefully, as we talk in a Manchester cafe. "His mood could blacken and he could change his mind as he walked across the room. By the time he reached the centre of a room, his mood could have changed 180 degrees. If he made a decision, it was absolute. He was very, very dominant when we were younger. It was his house and his rules, which is why I left aged 15-and-a-half. I thought, 'I'm old enough to earn money so I'm off now.'"
She was part way through her final year at high school when she left home and was taken in by Ann Oldroyd, a single mother in nearby Calder Vale who held an open house for waifs and strays in the area.
Oldroyd, says Hobbs, was not a surrogate parent but "a real maverick, a real character, a very poetic woman, a very, very free spirit who approached life in an extremely unconventional way. She lived in a house with no wallpaper, no carpet, no furniture to speak of. I can't even remember how we managed to eat each night, but we did. She had a few wonderful children of her own, but the house was full of young people she felt she could help."
She adds: "She inspired me in the same way that Peel did. She showed me that there was a different pathway and you didn't have to conform. You had to find your own way to live. It might be slightly different, or radically different to the way the rest of society rolls."
It is an ethos that has stayed with Hobbs: last month, she celebrated her 50th birthday by flying to Los Angeles on a whim and DJing at her favourite club.
Hobbs stayed with Oldroyd until she was 16, when she left school with three O-levels and got a job in an egg-packing factory paying £39 a week – enough to get her own flat.
At 18, she decided to move to London and live in a bus in a car park with a heavy metal band called Heretic – her next "family". Working for a band, she thought, would be her pathway to her dream job of being a journalist ("not doing anything as conventional as going to Preston and reviewing a gig and sending it in").
After a year she wrote to the editor of her favourite magazine, Sounds, telling him all about her adventures in the car park and on the road with Heretic. He was intrigued enough to invite her in for a chat. There began a highly successful career in music journalism, which included the first UK cover story interviews with Nirvana and the Happy Mondays.
In May 1993, she was working at Select magazine when her mum called to say her dad had killed himself.
"He was very ill," she says now, calm and composed. "He was clinically depressed. He had many different types of treatment. He had some quite … oh, actually, I better not talk about that. Let's just say he was clinically depressed and had problems with alcohol. We tried for many, many years every conceivable form of therapy and of treatment for him but unfortunately it was unsuccessful. I don't know. I suppose in spite of his symptoms, which were very, very bleak, it's still an enormous shock when something like that happens."
When asked whether he was violent, she struggles to find words, before saying: "The times were really different then." Later, she emails to say: "I have come to terms with the fact that my father was very ill, and that the symptoms of his illness had consequences for me as his daughter, but I still love him and I forgive him for everything."
By the mid-90s she had segued into radio, becoming a founder member of the alternative station XFM before being poached by Radio 1. In 2010, she announced she was leaving the station to take up a job in charge of student media at Sheffield University. What was seen by many as a surprising move was arguably just her following Peel's unspoken maxim of staying true to her beliefs. Applying for the job was the result of a "silent promise" she says she made at Peel's funeral.
"One of the reasons I went to Sheffield University, I kind of made a silent promise to John at his funeral. I stood in the cathedral reflecting on just how fortunate I had been to be the beneficiary of so much of his wisdom over the years I had spent with him at Radio 1. I thought at some point I need to create an opportunity to pass on his wisdom to the next generation. So when I resigned from Radio 1, I went to Sheffield University quite deliberately to do that. I very much see it as his torch I was passing to the next generation of broadcasters to share some of his bravery."
Last January, she went back to the BBC to host the weekend breakfast show on 6 Music and she still DJs all around the world. But not a day goes by without her thinking of her Dream Dad. "I still miss John every day of my life," she says. "I think everybody does."
• Mary Anne Hobbs is talking about her love of John Peel and unconventional families at The School of Life at the Conway Hall in London on 22 June
