David Cavanagh

David Cavanagh approached popular music as a journalist attentive to institutions, personalities, and the changing language of criticism. Good Night and Good Riddance examines selected broadcasts from John Peel’s long BBC career, following the programs from 1967 to 2004 and setting the music against shifts in British culture. Faber & Faber published the book in 2015. Rather than offer a conventional life story, Cavanagh uses hundreds of individual shows to track Peel’s evolving enthusiasms, contradictions, and influence on listeners. The method lets punk, reggae, indie, electronic music, and other scenes appear in the order that radio audiences encountered them. An Irish writer who contributed to Sounds, Q, Mojo, Uncut, and other magazines, Cavanagh had earlier chronicled Creation Records in My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize. His experience with record-industry history gives this later work both documentary density and a sharp sense of how broadcasting shaped musical memory.