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Then, in 2002 as I finally assembled the 90 minutes of recordings that had survived in my collection, I met, across the misty mists of the Internet, Velvet Fogg Ben who had a major chunk of the same program on tape from a different source.

Over a few months, using as our guide a full, but slightly inaccurate, track listing of the full playlist, we planned my assault on a full reconstruction of the entire five and a half hour show. Ben found a tape trader who had most of the last 2 hours. Meanwhile we scoured our record collections, our friends, contacts and even made an occasional purchase, so as to round up hi-fi copies of all of the material Peel played. Almost 90% of Peel’s intros and outros had survived on one or other of the source tapes, leaving only a dry sequence towards the end of the first hour and midway through the fourth.

The popularity of this reconstruction as an internet download, led to some interesting contacts, eventually including someone who identified and supplied the Elmore James version of ‘Dust My Blues’. Amazingly, in the summer of 2005, an email arrived which led to us being offered the loan of a low generation cassette tape of the entire show will all of Peel’s links intact. We now have all the intros and outros intact, and correctly positioned. We introduced a single song previously missing from our lists, corrected the version of ‘Hippy Gumbo’ to the obscure variant which had surfaced only on a 2003 CD re-release, and, in some cases, improved the sonic content of the spoken word pieces. Is the reconstruction now finished? Well maybe: there is a lingering concern that the Howling Wolf ‘Dust My Blues’ is perhaps a different take from the one Peel played, and that the lengthy Frank Zappa sequence from ‘Absolutely Free’ comes from an extended version that inflates the length of the vinyl version that Peel actually played.

Almost 200 separate computer WAV files were balanced for volume, EQed, corrected in pitch, and finally cross faded together to reconstruct this last ‘benign nocturnal’ visit to the Perfumed Garden. Overall the music is fabulous, Peel’s observations on the state of the Underground priceless, and the early morning Medium Wave whine mostly tolerable.