Stowmarket: Tuesday, May 12, 1992:

They say never meet your heroes but I might disagree. When I was at college in Sheffield in the 1990s, studying photojournalism, we had to produce a portfolio of 10 pictures in certain categories.

They covered the various aspects of press photography and were designed to show that we could tackle any type of job we would be expected to deal with the we were actually doing the job for real.

One of the categories was a character study which was a portrait which showed the subject in their natural environment.

I had the idea of doing some portraits of the Radio 1 legend that was John Peel and hoped it could be in his radio studio.

Back in the day he was a musical institution who was well known for discovering the next big thing in music – I mean there were The Undertones and Marc Bolan for starters.

So I wrote to him asking him if he would do it and surprisingly he wrote back – his reply was written at the bottom of my original letter and it simply said: “yes”, then his home phone number, and it was simply signed “John”. I still have the letter somewhere.

I literally could not believe that he had actually responded so I rang him back and arranged to meet up. It turned out that I would meet him at his home in Stowmarket and, on the day, he actually drove to the railway station in his beat up old Volvo to pick me up and drove me back to his home.

When I arrived I met his wife and she kindly made me a much-needed cup of tea.

We went into his record room – which was two rooms which were actually on top of each other with the ceiling between them knocked out – and were just chock full of vinyl LPs and demo cassettes. Even though it was the early days of home computers he still relied on a typewriter and a card index system.

I noticed a copy of the weekly music magazine NME, which marked the publication’s 40th anniversary, which made a couple of good shots of him reading it. I also photographed him with his collection but the photo I later liked best was of him holding a cup of tea just looking thoughtful.

Anyway I passed my preliminary exams and the NME shot made it to the resulting portfolio. My only regret was that I did not shoot in colour that day.

But I did manage to get the NME shot published in that very magazine but the cup of tea shot is more reflective and a better picture I reckon.

I did write to him again a year later, after he did a show about motorbikes, and asked him if he could send me a copy of it on cassette and he gladly obliged which I thought was very kind of him. I still have the tape somewhere but nothing to play it on.

Apparently cassettes are making a comeback as a kind of hipster method of musical consumption. Personally I feel the inconvenience of having to fast forward or rewind to find the track you are looking for a bit too much of a hassle not to mention the agony of the prospect of getting the tape scrunched up because you have not cleaned the heads which was a total nightmare.

Also analogue photography seems to be making a comeback and I have considered buying some secondhand 35mm kit and shooting a few rolls of film. Being restricted to 36 shots per film would certainly focus the mind on the job in hand but then again you would also have to consider the cost and inconvenience of getting everything processed – I would need to find a decent lab that could do that job.