I have gone to bed with John Peel more often than with anyone else, writes John Waters.
Our affair started in 1972 and lasted nearly a decade. His programme, Top Gear, went out on BBC Radio One at 10 p.m., weekdays except Monday, which belonged to Whispering Bob Harris, who could be heard only as an occasional throaty bassnote on the wind from Blighty. Peel's confident, paragraphed delivery carried better.
The reception in Roscommon was erratic, at the mercy of daylight and weather. I would take the back off the transistor and with a tiny screwdriver adjust the capacitors and resistors when Beefheart grew faint, or Eno made sense. To this day, I avoid Tangerine Dream, knowing they won't be half as good without the static.
I was shocked by the paltry coverage of Peel's death in the Irish newspapers - a few paragraphs from the wires. Irish media have an annoying habit of treating British cultural figures as no more than neighbours.
But when I heard Peel's Radio One colleague Andy Kershaw describe his mentor as a more crucial figure in British pop culture than Lennon or McCartney, it stuck me that in Ireland he was far more important than that.
There is much blather now about how much things have changed here, but little understanding of the influences that set these changes moving. Without the laborious build-up of momentum in the lower gears, the freewheeling of the Tiger years would have been impossible.
The Ireland of the early years of Top Gear would be completely unrecognisable to today's Ireland, saturated in pop culture and youth obsession. Then, pop music was all but illegal, meriting a couple of hours weekly on national radio. RTÉ had one hour of rock 'n' roll - Ken's Club on Friday evening - and if you didn't like Steely Dan you were in the wrong shop.
In the UK, the emphasis since Peel's death has been on the exposure he gave to specific types of music, and how he championed particular bands when no one else gave them airtime. He cleared a space for punk to breathe, making a massive contribution to the extension of its social and political reach. But in Ireland, where there was no youth culture, John Peel's influence probably went much further.
Arguably, it was largely down to the impact of Top Gear that Irish music radio developed as it did in the 1970s, beginning with the pirate boom and culminating in the launch of RTÉ Radio 2. The burgeoning rock scene of 1970s Dublin might never have developed had not John Peel been there feeding the dreams and imaginations of a generation of young musicians. And though I never heard him enthuse much about either band, it is not implausible to suggest that, had John Peel not existed, neither would the Boomtown Rats nor U2, and the world might never have heard of either Sir Bob or Bono.
Peel was less a DJ than a teacher, although he rarely got into historiography or analysis. He simply presented and enthused at such a level of wit and intelligence as to convey a sense of the music's significance and connectedness, without breaking the spell of wonder and magic that his personality preserved around it. He has been described as an "eternal teenager", but this is an outsider's condescension. Peel was ever young but always old too, like an owl. When I first saw his photograph I thought him venerable, but he never seemed to grow older.
Breathtakingly, all those years on from Blanket Street, I found myself participating in a radio tribute last week, with B.P. Fallon and the brilliant Paul Morley. The stream of texts and messages afterwards confirmed something I had only briefly doubted: I was not alone.
Today we have a strange collective view of Irish culture, which, for all it disparages what is purely Irish, appears ignorant too of other things that moulded what we are.
The problem is not simply the fiction of Irishness that dogged us so long, but with perceiving correctly the effects of influences that ran counter to this prescription.
We still divide the world into Irish and non-Irish, and perceive the "alien" influence as a somewhat irrelevant accident, good or bad depending on where we stand on the issues once filed under "Gaelic Revival".
With British cultural influences, we seem conscious only of having experienced them in some serendipitous, spillover sense. Though many of these phenomena nurtured us when we had little to breathe with, we consider them mainly on their global significance, attributing importance according to scale, rather than the weight of their influence on us.
It is as though the true story of our living culture has not yet been drafted, never mind understood, as though the complex truth must remain a secret history understood only by a minority who imagine themselves misfits.
Self-understanding is lost between the twin inadequacies of what we were told we should become, and what we sought to become out of a petulance born of starvation.
That the reality is neither, but inextricably both, is something no element of our public apparatus seems capable of articulating.