Alexandra Ravenscroft

Alexandra Mary Anfield Ravenscroft (born 09 December 1977), commonly known as Danda, is the eldest daughter of John Peel and his wife Sheila Ravenscroft. Her birth was announced in Sounds, issue dtd. 17 December 1977, to justify the fact that there was no John Peel column that week. 
In 2003, she and her partner Ashley had a son called Archie (born 24 September 2003), who became Peel's first grandchild. Alexandra went to Combs Middle School with her older brother William Ravenscroft and also studied at the University of Salford in Manchester for two years and later finished her final year at Brighton University in 2001 . After education, she opened a delicatessen in Norwich called Clark & Ravenscroft, which had generally good reviews on the Tripadvisor site . In 2019, the cafe was closed down. 
==Mentioned In Shows==
;1979
*15 November 1979: Larry Bright: One Ugly Child (JP: "Actually the main reason I played that was because my daughter Alexandra pulled it out of a pile of records and I saw this as being an act of Kenny Dalglish and thought I'd better play it.")
*13 December 1979: First Undertones track (She's A Runaround) is dedicated to daughter Alexandra. A second one (Girls Don't Like It) is squeezed in near the end of the show after Peel speeds through the other records.
;1980
*09 July 1980: Introduction: "Welcome. You are listening to a program that's guaranteed not to contain any references to the weather... Alexandra Mary Anfield sings Crying... But first, is there any one here who can saw this guitar in half for me?"
*09 July 1980: JP: "My Daughter Alexandra... aged 2, has also done a pretty telling version of it, so this is her singing Crying." Alexandra Mary Anfield Crying. JP: "Not a dry eye in the house I bet."
;1982
*19 January 1982: Peel mentions that a 14 year boy (Andrew) is staying at Peel Acres and that he rang up to see what is going on and his 4 year old daughter, Alexandra, answered the phone saying that she has gone out of the bathroom and is going to the sitting room so that Andrew can see her naked body. He then says: "Do you think I got problems lined up in the not too distant future we disc jockeys tend to say"?
*09 December 1982: The Gladiators track played for “senior female frog-child” Alexandra on her birthday.
;1984
*21 February 1984: Peel dedicates the Tim Buckley's The River song to his daughter, Alexandra, who is going for a hospital routine
;1985
*19 August 1985: Peel mentions doing Round Table last week with Princess and Paul King and is grateful to King for being nice to his daughter Alexandra who is a fan of him, when Peel took her along. JP then plays a record from Reluctant Stereotypes, who Paul King was a former member.
*28 August 1985: Peel mentions that his daughter Alexandra has removed pictures of Wham! and replaced them with Paul King on her bedroom wall.
;1986
*13 May 1986: Peel says that Alexandra was impressed with Wanda Jackson's Rock Your Baby, while the track was playing when she and William were helping Peel move records.
*Peel 037 (BFBS): (JP: 'Speaking of Wham!], I went last weekend to see their final concert at Wembley. It was about seven hours long, the whole event, starting with Gary Glitter and then Nick Heyward, and then their rather tedious film, which was like a very expensive home movie, of their trip to China, but the ensemble them self were most interesting to watch. Andy Ridgeley, or whatever his name is, actually does nothing at all: he's got a cosmetic guitar which he rushes about with, but that was about it. I took my daughter Alexandra, who's eight, to see it, and she was much impressed, as you might imagine. It made me realise how country she is, in fact. We live about 100 miles out of London: when we got there, she was rather alarmed by the number of people she saw walking towards Wembley, and at that time there was only twenty of them where we were, and she said, "Are there going to be a lot of people, Daddy?", and I said, "Well, there's going to be quite a few," and she said, "What? More than there were at my birthday party?," and I had to assure her that this was the case. Mind you, she's not that country, because the following day, I discovered a list of rude words that she'd got in her bedroom for educational purposes, most of which were misspelled.')
*11 August 1986: Peel mentions that his sons William, Thomas and daughter Alexandra were camping in the garden throughout the night and then they heard a thunderstorm at 4am, which they decided that they should be brought back in the house, after he and the Pig were completely wet in pajamas whilst rescuing them from the rain.
*13 October 1986: Peel dedicates the Biz Markie track to his son William, who got within 30 hours, a brown belt in Karate and his orange belt in Judo. As well as his other children, Tom, who got his green belt in Karate and his daughter Alexandra, who lost 2 fights in a spirited manner, which the Pig witnessed.
;1987
*06 April 1987: (JP: 'And the Smiths as you know have already recorded a song about William and the new one is about Sheila, which is the Pig's real name, so there is only only Thomas, Florence and Alexandra to go, here it is')
*01 June 1987: Peel mentioned playing football over the weekend with his children and said Alexandra scored some goals, but had some injury on his lips from her kick.
*Peeling Back The Years 6 (Transcript): John Walters: What do they think of the music they hear you playing? Do they ever express an opinion? JP: Yes. It’s unfavourable in almost every instance. In fact, a couple of years ago, William and Alexandra, who are the two older children, did come in – it was one of those wonderful kind of situations where you feel actually this is not the way it is supposed to happen at all – they did come in because they were watching television and said, “Daddy, do you mind turning the records down a bit, we can’t hear the television.” I said, “Hold on a second. I’m supposed to say that to you.”
*Peel 074 (BFBS): (JP: 'In case I sound a little tense this week, it's because I spent a lot of the time trying to persuade my wife that we ought to have a fifth child, because the four previous children, I should explain, are called William Robert Anfield, Alexandra Mary Anfield, Thomas James Dalglish, and Florence Victoria Shankly. I was thinking, we've got to have a fifth one so that we can put Barnes in there somewhere, because after his performance against Everton the other week, the man has got to be immortalised in some way.')
*28 September 1987: (JP: 'This is a record which could easily be recorded by William 11, Alexandra 9, Thomas 7 and Florence 5. In fact it's by the Angry Samoans, but it applies at our house, My Old Man's A Fatso')
*09 December 1987: Peel mentions that his daughter Alexandra is celebrating her 10th birthday today and will spend it roller skating with friends in Bury St Edmunds.
;1988
*09 May 1988: Peel says his daughter Alexandra thinks the African record from Sam Mangwana is cool.
*12 December 1988: Peel mentions that it was his daughter's, Alexandra's 11 years old birthday, which was celebrated at a swimming pool in Sudbury, Suffolk. He also mentions that coming back from the birthday party, a youth puked at the back of his car, which he then plays a track called Contaminated by Uncle Slam.
*19 December 1988: JP: "I warned you at the beginning of the programme that there was going to be a moment of self-indulgence, as if the whole thing wasn't self indulgent. Our William and our Alexandra are at a school called Combs Middle School in Suffolk and they put on a really good, I mean genuinely good show each year. Last year's came second in some kind of national competition and they entered the same competition this year with something called 'A Disuse Waves The Rules'. It has music by Simon Clover and lyrics by Ian Cristle, who are both teachers at the school, and our William and Alexandra go there, and they allow anybody who wants to take part in the thing at all can, which means obviously there are a lot of people in it. I went along to see it last week, really expecting you know to be vaguely, frankly bored by the whole proceedings, and it was really very, very good. I mean, so good that I went along to see it again, and not just because our Alexandra is in the chorus on this particular thing I'm about to play you. And you can hear William playing alto-saxophone about one minute and forty-two seconds into it, in case you want to listen that closely. As I say, very self-indulgent, but it means a lot to me."  Combs Middle School: Beach Boy (from 'Odysseus Waives The Rules')
;1989
* 06 March 1989: Peel mentions that his daughter Alexandra is telling him that her friends listen to the programme to see how many mistakes he makes.
*14 March 1989: Peel mentions that on Thursday afternoon, his children's school choir featuring his son William and daughter Alexandra will appear on Blue Peter.
*15 March 1989: Peel mentions that his son, William, and their daughter, Alexandra, will appear on Blue Peter tomorrow as part of their Combs Middle School's music performance.
*24 August 1989: Peel mentions his daughter, Alexandra is in the studio. and says to her on air, 'Are you bored Danda?', which she replies, 'Yes'
*24 December 1989 (BBC Radio East Anglia): (JP: 'Sorry about this, listeners, but a father's got to do what a father's got to do.') (He plays the next track for Alexandra.) Belinda Carlisle, 'Circle In The Sand (LP-Heaven On Earth)' (MCA)
*26 December 1989: (JP: 'The children have just elected a representative, Alexandra, 12, to come in and find out when the programme ends: that's how much they're enjoying it. I was just looking over to see whether the Mayo phone was ringing, and it hasn't rung once since the programme started. Either this means that nobody's listening, or that those few people who are listening think that the programme's pre-recorded anyway. If it was pre-recorded, it would be better than this.')
;1990
*11 April 1990: Peel gets his children, William, Alexandra and her friend Joanna to draw the winners of the Fall competition, to win a copy of their single.
*17 July 1990: (JP: 'I phoned home this afternoon, having been away for a couple of days, and Alexandra, 12, answered the phone, and immediately said, when she recognised my voice, "Not you again! Look, I'm a busy woman, I've a business to run, you know!" I think I'm a figure of fun to them.')
*23 July 1990: Peel mentions that Alexandra and two friends had been to Wembley the previous evening to see Madonna in concert.
*23 August 1990: (Alexandra & Anna: "Why don't you play some surf music, fatso?", JP:"Not tonight")
*21 October 1990: Peel mentions Thomas and Alexandra are taking part in a school theatre competition in London.
*08 December 1990: Peel mentions his daughter Alexandra will be 13 at midnight.
;1991
*06 January 1991: (inserted link done by two children, one of whom is Peel's daughter: 'I'm Alexandra...', '...and I'm Anna.' (together) 'Why don't you play some surf music, fatso?' JP: 'Maybe later, if you're very very good. But first, the controller speaks.')
;1992
*15 May 1992: (JP: 'I can pick 'em, eh? Once again, I find myself asking, who do Americans like that vote for?....I just phoned up home to see what was going on there, and our Alexandra, 14, answered the phone, and is she listening to her daddy on the radio? No she is not, she's listening to her Nirvana cassettes. Wouldn't you listen to your dad if your dad was on the radio? Mmm, probably not.')
*04 September 1992: (JP: 'Briefly back to the Reading Festival. As you know, second from top of the bill on Sunday night, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and I have to admit that I didn't much care for the last Nick Cave LP, because it did seem to me, and people are doubtless going to write in and complain about this as well, as though some computer had analysed Nick Cave's previous lyrics, and then written some new songs on his behalf and he'd recorded them and put them on an LP. There seemed to me to be an element of that involved. Of course, top of the bill were Nirvana. I managed to get my son Thomas and my daughter Alexandra on to the stage with her mates, so that they were sort of, they could see everything that was going on on the stage, and then when the band went off, to kind of regroup or do anything at all, they had to come and stand by where they were sitting. Obviously, they were very pleased to be in that position. Afterwards, I was hoping they were going to say, "Kurt turned round and said something really interesting", or passed on some bit of gossip. In fact what they were saying was, "Oh, he winked at me", or, "he trod on my foot", so they were more impressed by the status of the artistes than anything else. The 90-minute set sounded pretty good to me. Kurt didn't look particularly fit, but then at the same time, what had been written about him in the papers and the tabloids and things didn't seem to be evidence of it anyway.')
*07 September 1992 (Ö3): (JP: 'My daughter Alexandra has removed all the pictures of horses that decorated her bedroom and replaced them with posters of Nirvana. I suppose that's fairly significant.')
*25 December 1992: (JP: 'In my indulgent way, I asked each of my children to choose a record for tonight's programme, and this is our Alexandra's choice.') Nirvana: 'Floyd The Barber (LP-Bleach)' (Sub Pop)
*11 December 1992: The Unsane track is played from a borrowed copy of the LP that was a gift to daughter Alexandra on her recent fifteenth birthday.
*19 December 1992: (JP: 'After the news, it'll be Danda's selection, which appears to have been covered in rich alluvial deposits since I last played it, but we'll see how it works out.') Sonic Youth: 'Dirty Boots (LP-Goo)' (DGC)
;1994
*28 January 1994: Peel mentions that his children, Alexandra & Thomas and Florence all took their speech & drama exams and says that his other son William has got a place at University of Liverpool as long as he passes his A-Levels. He also said that he got an NME award as well.
*16 April 1994 (BFBS): John tells of the holiday Alexandra organised off her own bat for the family to the industrial part of Southern France and the conversation there turned to the suicide of Kurt Cobain.
;1996
*13 January 1996 (BFBS): Another mention for Peel's appearance on This Is Your Life: after Alexandra had given all the football-related names of the children, JP suggested that another child, to be named after Stan Collymore, would be a good idea. Sheila apparently did not agree.
*01 June 1996 (BFBS): Peel relates the tale of an argument between Alexandra and her boyfriend Aidan that awoke him at 3.30 a.m.
*18 August 1996: Peel is proud of Alexandra doing well in her A Levels, despite the Pig suffering a brain haemorrhage last month, while she was studying for her exams.
;1997
* 03 June 1997: Peel plays the intro to the TV series Betwitched at the beginning of the show, as he mentions his daughter Alexandra saying it is her favourite TV programme.
*23 December 1997: Verve: 'Sonnet (CD-Urban Hymns)' (Virgin/Hut) Alexandra Ravenscroft (DJ's daughter)
;1998
* June 1998 (FSK): Peel mentions that his daughter Alexandra has arrived at the drive by coming from University of Manchester with her new boyfriend, which he has not met. He also mentions a birthday party is going to happen in the other side of the house.
*20 December 1998 (BFBS): John professes himself to be "wound up" by the aftermath of Alexandra's 21st birthday party, which Sheila is currently sorting out. "This is part of the pleasure of child-rearing, as some of you will discover, if you've not discovered already."
;2000
* July 2000 (FSK): Peel mentions Electrelane come from Brighton, where his daughter Alexandra is studying.
* October 2000 (FSK): Peel mentions his daughter Alexandra is hanging around with a band called Clearlake.
*27 December 2000: (JP: 'Well, if it was up to me, there'd be at least six Laura Cantrell tracks in the Festive Fifty. Find out if there are more tomorrow when we go from number 20 to number 1, and Alexandra just came downstairs to tell me that she and her mum were listening upstairs, so that's one out of four anyway.')
;2001
*19 July 2001: (JP: 'There's no Pig's Big 78 in tonight's programme cos she's gone into Ipswich to see our Alexandra. But I know she would approve of this from the Bhundus.')
*01 August 2001: JP spent much of the day driving to and from Brighton to the graduation ceremony of his daughter Alexandra Ravenscroft. He bemoans the terrible traffic congestion in the town. "3 miles in 2 hours".
*20 September 2001: JP: "Our Alexandra, who has no interest in football at all was watching it with her Aunty Gabs who also has no interest in football, and I've never heard so much shrieking going on. Ipswich extremely unlucky not to win. The Pig has been at the match and hopefully will return with a match report probably incandescent with fury at about eleven o'clock."
*14 November 2001: Peel recalls a recent event in Ipswich he’d attended “as minor local celeb.” This ended up with him handing out mysterious certificates whose purpose he never discovered and then having red wine spilt in his lap by daughter Alexandra: “So I left the place not just like a confused old man who didn’t know what was going on but a confused old man who didn’t know what was going on who had wet himself.”
;2002
*20 August 2002: Peel mentions that he once owned a jukebox but had sold it to buy Alexandra a pony.
*04 December 2002: (JP: 'A rather tense evening actually in our family because obviously I'm here in London doing the programme...but the Pig and Flossie and Alexandra, our daughters are at Anfield, where, at the moment anyway, they're playing extra time after Ipswich have held Liverpool to a 1-1 draw, and Ipswich scored first, too. I mean (sounds rather choked) I've supported Liverpool since, I don't know, twelve, no, earlier than that, ten, something like that, and (pause) I just...I mustn't go on, I'll make meself upset. Anyway, should they be listening, which quite clearly they won't be, because they'll be watching the match, here's a tune for them.')
;2003
*August 2003 (FSK): Peel mentions by the time the September 2003 (FSK) programme is made, he would be a grandfather because of his daughter Alexandra expecting to give birth.
;2004
*28 January 2004: (JP: "And the other day our grandson Archie was around at our house and his mum, Danda, was singing to him to try and get him to go to sleep, and I said to her, "Danda, did I ever used to sing to you when you were a child, and she said "Only 'Lonesome Fugitive', Dad".") After the heart-warming intro Peel then plays his old favourite by Roy Buchanan - at the wrong speed.
*22 April 2004: When a listener requests the Dirty Funker remix of Nirvana's "Lithium", Peel suggests that Alexandra (described as a "hardcore Kurt Cobain fan") has "probably removed it from the premises". While John is still talking, Alexandra phones up to vehemently deny this, a message that is passed on by Sheila.
== See Also ==
*Gigography 1986
* Sounds
==External Links==
*Clark & Ravenscroft
*Twitter
*Facebook
*Norfolk Broads
Category:People