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| - John Walters, John Peel's producer from 1969 to 1991, was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire on 11 July 1939. In 1966 he married Helen Gallagher; he died in Oxted, Surrey on 30 July 2001. Walters studied fine art at Durham University and worked as a schoolteacher and journalist in Newcastle before embarking on a career as a professional musician. Originally a trumpet player with local trad jazz bands (some tracks by Bill Croft's Blue Star Jazzmen, with Walters on trumpet, appeared in 2014 on a Lake Records anthology, "British Traditional Jazz At A Tangent Vol. 4 - Territory Bands"), he went on to join the Alan Price Set, toured with them and played on most of their hits. He appeared with them at the last British concert by the Beatles, at the Empire Pool, Wembley, when Price's group were one o
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| - John Walters, John Peel's producer from 1969 to 1991, was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire on 11 July 1939. In 1966 he married Helen Gallagher; he died in Oxted, Surrey on 30 July 2001. Walters studied fine art at Durham University and worked as a schoolteacher and journalist in Newcastle before embarking on a career as a professional musician. Originally a trumpet player with local trad jazz bands (some tracks by Bill Croft's Blue Star Jazzmen, with Walters on trumpet, appeared in 2014 on a Lake Records anthology, "British Traditional Jazz At A Tangent Vol. 4 - Territory Bands"), he went on to join the Alan Price Set, toured with them and played on most of their hits. He appeared with them at the last British concert by the Beatles, at the Empire Pool, Wembley, when Price's group were one of the supporting acts. Alan Price had respect for Walters' musicianship, telling Beat Instrumental magazine in a January 1967 interview that he was crucial to the band's sound ("John is a heavy player.....")[1] He became interested in radio production work as a result of recording BBC radio sessions with Price's band. As he told John Tobler in Zigzag 24 (1972): ....I wrote to them. They'd heard of the Alan Price Set and invited me for an interview. I told them that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life rushing up and down the M1 and, much to my surprise, the BBC almost snapped my hand off. They were so very amazed that anyone should actually want to leave the million-pounds-a-week Beatle style life (they had no clear idea of what a real group's life was like), and they thought I must be crazy.... Walters joined Radio One in 1967,gaining his first experience on the weekly magazine programme Scene and Heard. He then worked with Jimmy Savile and David Symonds,before becoming Peel's producer in 1969. He also produced Radio Flashes, when Peel was on holiday, which featured stand in hosts Vivian Stanshall and Keith Moon. Walters was a radio enthusiast, like Peel, and later became a broadcaster in his own right. appearing on the likes of Start The Week, The News Quiz, Loose Ends and Woman's Hour. From 1981, he had his own Radio 1 series, Walters' Weekly, which covered "different aspects of the arts. leisure and entertainment...from Rauschenberg to rockabilly, from jogging to juggling. food, fashion and football", as the Radio Times put.it. Other appearances included BBC TV's Northern Lights and in 1990 he hosted another Radio 4 series, Largely Walters, which examined a variety of topics ranging from cannibalism to trainspotting. A Radio 4 series, Idle Thoughts (1992-94) ended when he retired from the BBC. Walters Beside The Seaside (1994), also on Radio 4, took a dryly laconic look at the traditional British holiday, while the 1997 series Stuck in...featured visits by Walters to "English towns whose names alone mean they will never be the destination for those in search of culture or romance" (e.g. Slough, Wigan, Hull). Also in 1997, he narrated Retying the Knot, a BBC Scotland TV documentary on The Incredible String Band, who had done sessions for Peel shows he had produced. Peel said of him before he died, "Walters is sustained in his retirement by his determination to deliver the eulogy at my funeral. This will be unbelievably long and more about Walters than me".
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