Humble hero of UK music: former colleague Paul Gambaccini pays tribute to a 'mentor and hero'.

The first time I set foot in Radio One was as a university student in 1972 to interview John Peel for the British edition of Rolling Stone. His producer John Waiters sat in and one year later invited me to present a weekly talk on a new show called Rockspeak. So began my British broadcasting career.

For two formative years I shared the Walters-and-Peel office, as Andy Kershaw would do a decade later, sometimes sitting on an upside-down wastebasket because there were no extra chairs. I received my Radio One education in that room, now levelled to the ground along with the rest of Egton House.

John Peel taught me honesty in the selection of music and sincerity in presentation. He was my mentor and my hero, and when my assistant Will told me he had died I felt like a little boy for about five minutes. My mentor had left me and I was all alone to cope. Then the phone started ringing with the inevitable unremitting requests for tributes, and I had to grow up fast. I had to articulate as a man what this giant of a teacher had meant to me as a boy.

Earlier this year the Times asked me to identify what they called my "spirit mentor". I picked John Peel. We were photographed together for the article howling with laughter at some Peel anecdote. Were it not for the fact that the men in the picture looked older, the picture could have been taken three decades ago.

Somewhere around 1979 the Radio One football team played a showbusiness squad during the halftime of a schoolboy international at Wembley Stadium. I was, completely undeservedly, ...