Maybe ear splitting hardcore wasn’t your thing. Maybe nine minute slabs of dub weren’t your thing. But you couldn’t deny what the guy meant to people.

And to the like of us – a struggling indie band from a little town in East Anglia, touring the UK in a Nissan Primera – John Peel meant everything. John played every record we released, and The Dawn Parade recorded two Peel sessions. After the session, we talked about the number of letters John received from bands, and he became genuinely melancholy for a moment, describing how he understood how much hope was contained in each package. A band is a struggle; music is a struggle; the world is a struggle; you just felt John Peel was on your side.

Struggles give birth to folk wisdom, and the indie music world, as a great, cacophonous Struggle In-Excelsis, overflows with the stuff. Ask anybody in a band and they’ll tell you the following: an A&R man wouldn’t know a killer riff if it beat him to death with a stratocaster; MTV’s all gloss and no balls; the NME’s about hair cuts; radio stations just bin anything you send them. In the last few years I’ve spent on tour with The Dawn Parade, in the back rooms of Britain’s pubs and clubs, where such wisdom flows like Red Stripe, the indie music world has positively radiated negativity. But you NEVER heard a bad word from anyone in a band about John Peel.

Why? Peel was a beacon. Champion of punk; reggae; hip-hop; the Radio One DJ who played the same song twice in a row. John Peel had wit and John Peel had integrity. And John had something even more than integrity – he had Soul.

A John Peel story, remarkable precisely for its unremarkability: The Dawn Parade’s first single, 'Good Luck Olivia', was released on a record label I made up on the back of a beer mat in a Cambridge pub. We paid for it ourselves, did our own press and radio, booked our own tour. The record labels ignored their phones ringing. The press wouldn’t touch us. John Peel didn’t just listen, he played our song on national radio – and it meant enough that we’d phone a friend from 300 miles away in Scotland to ask if John had mentioned the gig. And now and then, he’d phone up while we were on tour, just to see how things were going.

A year later, and The Dawn Parade are at Maida Vale Studios, about to play a live Peel Session. I’m warming my voice up in the BBC toilets, singing scales, when John walks in, and advances to the urinal. I’ve never spoken to the guy face to face before, and naturally I stop singing, but John insists I carry on, wonders if I could sing him a White Stripes tune maybe? Then he zips up, goes back to the controls and plays some trance. Or was it a grind-core metal tune? Or was it that folksy Loudon Wainwright song? John was that rarest of things: someone who gave a damn. Someone who really cared.

Someone with soul. In 2004, the music industry can give birth to baby gods in time for the Christmas singles boom and discard them like dead turkeys before twelfth night, but this one quality – Soul - it can’t imitate, brand and manufacture, and Peel had as much musical soul as anyone who ever lived. John Peel was number one, and he lives on in all the music he’s inspired.

Greg McDonald