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Before Trinity: The 100 Ton Test

May 7, 1945:

To help in preparing the instrumentation for the Trinity shot the "100 Ton Test" was fired on 7 May 1945. This test detonated 108 tons of TNT stacked on a wooden platform 800 yards from Trinity ground zero. The pile of high explosive was threaded with tubes containing 1000 curies of reactor fission products. This is the largest instrumented explosion conducted up to this date. The test allowed the calibration of instruments to measure the blast wave, and gave some indication of how fission products might be distributed by the explosion.

Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie

100

ton

The 100 Ton Test

he was utterly unique and there was no-one else playing that stuff on MAINSTREAM NATIONAL radio

Thank you for saying that Andrew. Back then, the Radio One DJs were a cowardly and disgusting bunch of idiots, who basically played whatever was handed to them. John Peel however, played exactly what he liked, including strange promotional records like "Energy For Northampton" which was something given away to promote Electricity. This may seem terribly quaint and deliberately oddball, but what it illustrates is that he really did play anything that he liked that came his way.

Back to the systemic problems at Radio One; you need to try and imagine what sort of clamped down time that was. You can get an idea of what it was like by taking note of how the BBC today, when it eulogises John Peel, deliberately fails to mention the actual names of the PIRATE STATIONS that gave him his first airtime in the UK, years BEFORE there was a Radio One the bastard child of Radio Caroline and Radio London.

<>There used to be a meeting every Monday at Radio One where a group of corrupt people would sit down and listen to the single releases from the major labels. They would then decide, by committee, which records would be played to the entire nation. Yes. Just like Stalinist airbrushing Russia, The BBC did this every week; it brutally controlled and corralled its captive audience, and if you did not get your single into that room, and if one of your cronies was not in there, your record could not be played on the radio, full stop. <>

John Peel short circuited all of that. He played records from labels that could not afford to bribe this committee, and thus, we got to hear about groups like , well, you name it. I say bribe deliberately, not as a provocation, but because this was literally true. Only major label releases were considered in this meeting room, and the same groups, literally and figuratively, The Status Quo, kept being given heavy rotation over and over again. This was at a time of the greatest flowering of new music ever in pop, and it was all being systematically ignored by the BBC.

John Peel's death is a tragedy, because, really, he was not that old, and I always imagined that he should be made the controller of BBC Radio One, and that, as a knight in shining armor, he would repurpose all the bad DJs there, and replace them with people that actually liked playing records and that actually liked music. It was not to be. Had it happened however, Radio One would actually have meant something again, and we would have had an ecosystem within which we could all live and thrive.

I remember John Peel playing all sorts of simply great records, and saying out loud, "I gave this record to 'Tony Bannekburn' because I think its that good...I just dont understand why they wont play this!". It was clear to everyone that listened to him that he was right, and not only right, but had a track record of being correct; why then, did not the other DJs play great music from groups like, well, you name them. Once these groups had been played on The John Peel show, they (and not inevitably) picked up some fans, and were enjoyed by someone somewhere; why not play these records to everyone? There was nothing wrong with the records or the songs, it was just that they didn’t have the payola pounds to get into that room, and that was a great injustice, not only to the bands and labels, but to the public, who we all felt would for sure, fall in love with, shall we say,....well, you name the group. There were so many. So very many.

And then, there was the stuff that no one would like, except the likes of me and the THESE boys and the other tens of thousands "like us". We got played to us, things that we simply didn’t think could exist, but which inspired us and enthralled us and, like THESE says, made us dream of the possibilities of 'what could be next'.

He also played old music. That show was an education, of the most gentle and brilliant kind. It made you want to explore older music, it made you aware of the continuity in popular music, and it blew your mind. All of my early exposure to the original blues men came via John Peel. That is a great debt to have to pay back. Also, much of the Dub Reggae that I heard came from John Peel's show. Impossible to repay. So many music’s, so faithfully and enthusiastically played, with an equal admiration for all the music under his stylus, all given equal weight, (unless he wasn’t sure about something - he often played things he wasn’t sure of, giving them a chance to grow on him and us) - and this way of selecting music didn’t have a name, it was just right and you could trust it and you knew that at 10:00 when that guitar started playing, that some magic was about to be unleashed upon you.

The sessions, groups that no one had heard of before, more often than not, classic and talented groups, rarely failed to surprise and inspire. And on the small occasions where a session didnt work out, I remember John Peel actually saying, "hmmm I thought they sounded better than this when I saw them live, which is why we booked them". But this didn’t mean that the more established groups didn’t get return sessions either. Often, and indeed very often, groups would be invited back again and again to record sessions, to “see what they were up to now", to see how they had progressed, and if you look back over the sessions of an oft invited group chronologically, you can see them develop, improve, innovate and exceed themselves...or fall apart. Many of these sessions contained versions of songs that were better than the ones that subsequently appeared on the "official" releases. There are many examples of this, where the definitive versions were the Peel Session versions. Bob "Serpent" Sergeant was one of my favorite producers. The versions of songs he produced were almost always better than the ones that got released.

Like THESE said, there was no internet then; you had to listen to the show and record it yourself on cassette, or someone had to "do you a tape" of it if you missed it, or you could, much later, get a compilation tape of many sessions from "Eddie Wolfram" or one of his contemporaries. You could not just get this music easily, it was hard to track down, and if you lived outside of London, you had real problems getting things. Propagation was slow, but every night, John Peel's show connected you to a pure source of what was going on, including dates of who was playing where and when. Your only other source of this info was the NME, which of course is nothing like it used to be, and I dont mean that in a sour way, but I say it as an indication of how literally essential it was, if you were interested in music, since there were so very few ways that information could get out. But I digress.

John Peel showed me that you should follow your own ears, and that if you do that, it will all come right. Its a simple idea, but hard to pull off, because the people around you are all so stupid, just like the BBC programmers are stupid; every independent label owner and music lover had to put up with the ignorant, frightened and dumb people who would come up with phrases like "no one wants to hear that" or some other garbage, and yet, time and again, the greatest groups were always played first by John Peel. What a world it was. What a world it has become. John Peel was someone that you felt would in some way, always be there working away...what a shock that he is now suddenly gone. There will never be another John Peel, and even if the impossible happened and there was, everything is so fragmented now, that persons force would be nullified by all the different channels out there. Who knows. One thing is for sure though, that man existed inside an institution that should have flattened him out completely. He stayed there, played what he wanted, was a tower of integrity, and he made us. Literally. And this was done simply through the pure love of music, of many many different kinds. And playing it.

Sympathy to "The Pig" and his 4 children. A true man, gone forever.

Before Trinity: The 100 Ton Test

Identity Cards
A Summary of Findings from the Consultation on Legislation on Identity Cards

October 2004

Home Secretary Sets Out next Steps on ID Cards

Reference: 331/2004 - Date: 27 Oct 2004 10:50