JOHN PEEL

I will miss having someone like John Peel around. I actually didn't hear his show that often, but was always aware of how unusual he was in the media. A real music fan, and a hero of radio. As radio fades into the past, I can't imagine anyone being in a similar niche again. The thing was that he didn't follow received opinion or "believe the hype". He played the music he liked, and refused to be stale and predictable. So, as a "grumpy old man", he broke the mould.

As an unsigned musician, I am made painfully aware, again and again, of how no one gives your material half an ear; no one cares a great deal about what you've laboured over - it couldn't possibly be in the same league as someone sponsored by a corporation, so why bother?

We planned to send our new demo to John Peel because he really did make the time to listen - and all the tributes tonight are testament to that.

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

I have just finished Notes from Underground, and I am genuinely puzzled by something. What did Dostoyevsky have in mind by going to such lengths to describe the main hero/anti-hero?

When the Underground man makes his "sympathetic" speech to Liza the prostitute, only what we know of him from the first part of the novel reminds us that he is not in earnest. I'm tempted, however, to think D was attempting to show the character groping towards redemption here. Is this naive of me? If the speech is supposed to be seen as entirely utterly mailicious and false, why does the Underground man give Liza his address? Only so that he can torture her more?

It is hard for me to imagine anyone so consumed by shame, bitterness and sadism that they could resist the final offer of love from Liza.

But my main question is about what D was trying to do in dedicating a whole novel to such a detailed portrait of someone so beyond redemption. Was he portraying this uniquely ruthless inconsistent character as a bleak comment on human nature in general or as a critical statement about the "Russian man"? i.e. it is a call to spiritual awakening. Only the latter seems to fit in with D's political conservatism, yet the relentlessly bleak tone would seem to suggest it's far from being a spiritual tract.

I read online that some critics have seen it as a dark reply to Rousseau's solitary walker.