Shortly before midnight on December 11, 1968, a Rolls-Royce painted in psychedelic colours pulled up outside the front door of BBC Broadcasting House. Out stepped John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They were greeted by John F Muir, a Radio 1 producer who was decidedly less flamboyant in dress and manner than his guests.
Muir led the pair down into the basement of the building, along a warren of ill-lit and claustrophobic corridors festooned with electrical cables and pipework. On arriving in John Peel’s Night Ride studio, he made the necessary introductions and then withdrew to view proceedings via the control-room window next door.
Muir hadn’t expected Lennon to accept his invitation to appear on the obscure late-night show — because the Beatle didn’t need the publicity — but he was pleased all the same, at least until halfway through the show, when Lennon produced a tape recording and asked Peel to play it on air. Muir’s heart began to beat faster. Given Lennon’s iconoclastic reputation, anything could be on the tape. After all, his latest album, Two Virgins, featured him naked on the cover. Muir nevertheless decided to take the risk. It turned out to be a recording of the heartbeat of Ono’s yet-to-be-born (and subsequently miscarried) baby: “Ka boom . . . ka boom . . . ka boom.”
The bosses at the BBC at the time remained rather buttoned-up, and at the height of his panic Muir was convinced that he would get the sack. As it turned out, a vicar did lodge a formal complaint the next day, saying that the interview was “in bad taste”, and The Times echoed this sentiment, but he was to keep his job until 1974. He then joined the Arts Council before moving to work at the Bhavan centre — a London-based organisation that promotes Indian culture and heritage.
John F Muir was born in 1937 and was educated at Dunfermline High School. After a spell in the RAF he joined the BBC in 1961 as a technical operator.
Advertisement
He married Maura Fahy in 1961 and the couple had a son, Gregor, who became a director at the Tate, and a daughter, Lucie, a fashion journalist.
On becoming a producer in 1968 his first notable radio creation was Peel’s Night Ride. The programme strongly divided critical opinion, but earned cult status from the increasingly influential hippy scene.
Muir was a producer at Radio 1 during the years when those DJs who were obsessed with celebrity tended to frequent the fourth floor of BBC Egton House — often ignoring the groundbreaking releases that were sitting in their in-tray, preferring instead to spend their time chasing up their latest personal appearance opportunities. In contrast, Muir was more of a “third-floor” man; this was the go-to place for those who were promoting performers such as Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin to meet like-minded BBC producers such as John Walters and Muir as well as their DJs — Peel, Bob Harris and Pete Drummond.
The kind of music that was in currency there was not the sort that appeared regularly on daytime Radio 1. However, BBC Egton House is now incorporated into the renovated and extended Broadcasting House as the John Peel Wing — rather than being named after the celebrity DJs who dominated the place in the 1960s.
“He booked an unknown band called Roxy Music for their first BBC session
During that decade, Muir worked with many inspirational figures from the nascent UK rock scene including Jeff Beck, Syd Barrett and Jack Bruce. While Muir was working on Sounds of the Seventies he booked an unknown band called Roxy Music, producing and broadcasting their first BBC session before they had a recording contract.
Advertisement
In late 1971 Muir booked David Bowie and Mick Ronson as a duo for the sort of intimate recording session that today might be classed as “unplugged”.
The record company was so grateful for the support that a bunch of flowers arrived in Muir’s office the next day. A few weeks later he booked Bowie for the John Peel Show, and so scooped the first performance of Ziggy Stardust outside the original recording studio.
John F Muir, radio producer, was born on April 25, 1937. He died of cancer on May 10, 2017, aged 80