1969 LPs Of The Year

Peel doesn't seem to have published a list of his favourite LPs of 1969, although, as ever, he praised many new records, both on his programmes and in his articles for International Times and Disc & Music Echo. The Christmas Special Top Gear of 27 December 1969 includes session tracks he had enjoyed that year, along with a few album tracks, including two from Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica alongside tracks from the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, the Beatles' Abbey Road, the Plastic Ono Band's Live Peace In Toronto and Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief. Among the many other LPs he praised in 1969 were Leonard Cohen's Songs From A Room, the Who's Tommy, Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and the Flying Burrito Brothers' The Gilded Palace of Sin (which he described on his show of 15 July 1999 as "one of the great LPs of all time"). 
However, in an article from early 1970 in an Irish magazine called The New Spotlight, Peel was interviewed by Pat Egan about some Irish acts. 
During the interview, Peel mentioned that he had two favourite albums of 1969:
# Van Morrison: Astral Weeks
# Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica (not mentioned in the article, but was an album that he definitely put in lists of all time favourites over the years)
Quoted on Van Morrison:
"His Astral Weeks album was a revelation. It's one of my two favourite albums of 1969. He's very big in the States, and rightly so'.That may have been how it seemed to Peel then (he was not the only listener to have been impressed by the Van Morrison LP, which was one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year and established Morrison as a solo artist), but as his career developed, he became well-known for revising his earlier opinions and for distancing himself from records, like the Morrison LP, which appeared in lists of all-time great rock LPs published by the likes of Rolling Stone magazine. The DJ admitted on a number of occasions that he preferred to focus on music which had a special personal meaning for him, or evoked episodes from his life. 
Therefore, in 1999, when it came to selecting tracks for the Peelenium 1969, he remained loyal to Captain Beefheart but ignored Astral Weeks, and chose tracks by his favourites Family (from the LP Family Entertainment) and Mike Hart (from the LP Mike Hart Bleeds) instead.
== External Links ==
* Brand New Retro
Category:Lists
Category:Discography