Andy Peebles, who has died suddenly aged 76, was for 14 years a disc jockey on BBC Radio 1, where he presented shows across the schedule, switching between mornings, afternoons and evenings.
In 1981, three years after joining Radio 1, he settled into a Friday evening spot with a programme combining music and a preview of the weekend’s sporting action. “I never dreamed that I’d get to talk to all those incredible people,” he said in a 2017 Radio Today podcast to mark the station’s 50th anniversary. “Ian Botham was about to become a worldwide star, Billy Beaumont was just about to lead his English rugby team to a grand slam, Kevin Keegan – great character – was at the forefront, captaining the England football side.”
But the interview with which Peebles had made his name, in December 1980, was with the former Beatle John Lennon, who had just released Double Fantasy, his first album in five years. With his second wife, Yoko Ono, Lennon spent more than three hours talking to Peebles at the Hit Factory recording studio in New York, before they and the BBC team spent several more hours eating at a Mr Chow restaurant.
The star spoke about the break-up of the Beatles a decade earlier (once they gave up touring, the occasional session in a recording studio “had [just] become a job”), acknowledged for the first time that Yoko was co-writer of his solo hit Imagine, and enthused about making future LPs.
Asked about his privacy and why he had settled in New York, Lennon said: “I can go right out this door now and go in a restaurant. Do you want to know how great that is? Or go to the movies. I mean, people come up and ask for an autograph or say ‘hi’, but they won’t bug you.”
Two days later, on 8 December 1980 – as Peebles flew home – Lennon was fatally shot by Mark Chapman outside his apartment at the Dakota building next to Central Park. The DJ said he turned down offers of “grubby money” from tabloid newspapers to discuss his meeting with Lennon, but he broadcast a tribute on Radio 1 with John Peel alongside him. The interview then ran in the five-part series John Lennon: 1940-80, which began a month later and was followed by a full transcription in the book The Lennon Tapes.
Another highlight of Peebles’s time at Radio 1 was travelling to Moscow in 1979 to present the station’s exclusive live broadcast of a concert by Elton John, one of the first staged by a pop act in the Soviet Union during the cold war.
The broadcaster described the visit as “terrifying”, with the BBC team constantly followed by KGB officers. “We are talking about walking around a city which in architectural grandeur terms was extraordinary to behold,” he recalled, “but in reality I spent the whole time, as did most of our party, looking over our shoulders.”
Peebles was born in London, to Mary (nee Simmonds) and Robert Peebles. His father, a head postmaster, died when Andy was 11. On leaving Bishop’s Stortford college, a private school, he trained in hotel management and catering at Bournemouth College of Technology (now Bournemouth University) – starting in 1967, just weeks before Radio 1 was launched, sounding the death knell for the offshore pirate stations of which Peebles said he was “a massive devotee”.
After showing his own talents as a DJ at a college dance, Peebles was hired to work at the town’s Samantha’s and Chelsea Village discos, then in London, at the Scotch of St James nightclub, and Manchester, at the Hardrock.
This led in 1973 to a job at BBC Radio Manchester. A year later, he moved across the city to one of Britain’s first commercial stations, Piccadilly Radio. Peebles was among Piccadilly’s founding broadcasters and, while there, started presenting Soul Train, a show that he took through his career to different stations.
When he came to the attention of Radio 1, Peebles began at the BBC in London with a weekday evening show in 1978. The following year, after a short run on the breakfast show, he switched between afternoons and mornings over the next few years until his daily shows ended in 1981 and he began his long-running Friday evening programme.
At Radio 1, he also presented the weekly magazine show Stayin’ Alive (1979-82), as well as My Top 12 (1981-83) and its successor, My Top Ten (1984-92), with rock stars picking their favourite music. He also revived Soul Train at weekends (1987-92) and made special programmes on Paul McCartney, Elton John and David Bowie (an interview recorded in New York during the weekend of his Lennon meeting).
Like most Radio 1 DJs, he also hosted Top of the Pops on BBC One, but only intermittently over five years (1979-84). “They were mad enough to employ the man who was ‘the perfect face for radio’,” he said, self-effacingly “I was never comfortable with television.”
When he was dropped from Radio 1 in 1992, Peebles moved to BBC Radio Lancashire (1992-99) as its morning show presenter, but was back in London at Radio 2 to host The Andy Peebles Soul Show on Wednesday evenings (1997-2002). At the same time, he presented the late show on BBC GMR in Manchester (1999-2002).
He was then heard on Jazz FM (2002-04) before a long stint on its successor, Smooth Radio (2004-13), then Gold Radio (2013-14), where Soul Train ended its on-and-off 40-year run.
Peebles also worked for the British Forces network BFBS and the BBC World Service, as well as reporting and commentating on cricket for the BBC nationally and Lancashire cricket regionally for 27 years.
He is survived by his wife, Anne (nee Swarbrick), whom he married in 2001, his stepdaughter, Sarah, and his sister, Jenny.
• Robert Andrew Peebles, radio presenter, born 13 December 1948; died 22 March 2025
• This article was amended on 25 March 2025 because an earlier version said that Peebles conducted the last interview with John Lennon. It was one of the last interviews with the former Beatle.
