John Peel, DJ and bearded national treasure, doesn’t do new technology. He is a self confessed vinyl junkie, claiming CDs lack of warmth. He doesn’t understand the modern obsession with gadgets and he lives in an isolated farmhouse in Suffolk that doesn’t even get reception for digital radio.

It is strange, then, that he drives one of the most sophisticated and futuristic cars on the road. “I’ve had the Toyota Prius for about five months and while you feel fantastically virtuous driving it because it’s so efficient (it manages 66mpg), there’s just too much clever technology in it,” he says. “I have to keep pulling over in laybys to work out how to do things.”

The Prius came to him courtesy of Toyota, which is trying to boost the profile of its hybrid car — powered by two engines, one electric and one petrol — by asking well known personalities to drive them. Peel has his for six months, after which it goes back to the car company, but he won’t be too sorry to see it go.

“It’s a very comfortable car to drive but it’s not very exciting, and like so many things today there’s so much stuff there that you don’t really want. It’s just confusing,” he says.

He’s happier by far with his own cars, despite the fact that they have seen better days. Parked outside his farmhouse is what he calls his day car, an Alfa 147 which he cheerily admits is too sporty for a man in his sixties but which he explains with reference to Dylan Thomas: “I’m just an old man raging against the dying of the light.”

Next to that is a “semi-retired” Mercedes 190E, covered in tree blossom, and he also owns a 1963 Chevrolet, a relic from his time spent in America during his twenties. It is locked up in his shed while he figures out what to do with it — something he has been pondering for 30 years.

“I’m a bit sentimental when it comes to cars, I’m afraid,” he says. “I just can’t bear to get rid of it. I learnt to drive in America and the very first car I ever bought was a Chevrolet in Texas. I seem to remember I drove it down the freeway for about 100 yards and crashed straight into a truck.”

Peel started his radio career almost by accident in Texas, having headed to America in search of adventure and landing a job as an insurance salesman. Fortuitously his arrival coincided with Beatlemania in the US and Peel was able to capitalise on the fact that he was from the Liverpool area and claim to be an expert on the Fab Four. The fluke landed him a job on local radio in Texas then Oklahoma and eventually in California. It also introduced him to a lifestyle centred around cars.

“In America it was essential to have a car,” he says. “I always think that a film like American Graffiti is essentially a documentary: that’s what our lives were like. You collected your friends and drove around and went to drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants and tried to chat up women and played the radio too loud, revved the engine and generally tried to show off.”

He owned a succession of Chevrolets, including a 1963 Stingray and a Chevrolet 409 — at the time GM’s largest engined road car. “In those days if you didn’t have much money you had a Ford or a Chevrolet — it was like supporting a football team. I had friends who would literally refuse a lift in a Ford. It was very sectarian.”

Things were a little different — and smaller — when he moved back to London in 1967 and where over the years he would discover the likes of Bryan Ferry, Pink Floyd, Pulp, Rod Stewart and the Smiths.

“I had to hire cars a lot of the time, especially Minis because they were so cheap,” he says. “I was driving hundreds of miles every week getting to gigs which always seemed to be way up in the north or in Scotland. I used to give the bands lifts to the gigs as well. I seem to remember having Captain Beefheart in the Mini once to drive to a gig in Kidderminster.”

He claims not to remember exactly how many motors he has gone through since; the constant gigging having taken its toll on most of them. “I’ve had Renaults, VWs, Land Rovers and a Peugeot,” he says, “I tend to keep them until they collapse to pieces.”

Today Peel is the last of Radio 1’s original line-up of DJs still at the station. He no longer has to traverse the country to go to gigs: such is his renown that they often come to him. PJ Harvey, Blur and the White Stripes have all recorded shows and paid homage at his farmhouse retreat.

Despite being 64, Peel still manages to draw the highest percentage of listeners under the age 16, “which considering I’m a bald, ugly old grandfather rather proves it is nothing to do with me and all about the music”. And it’s in his cars that he is able to keep up with the latest tunes.

“I listen to demos constantly in the car,” he says. “In fact I always say that I’ll die in a car crash trying to read the name of the band on a demo tape. The problem is that people will say ‘well, he’d have wanted to go that way’. But I want everyone to know for the record that — if it happens — it’s not true, I didn’t want to go like that.”

ON HIS CD CHANGER

In the car I mostly listen to demo tapes of unknown bands. But I also like Radio 3 because it gives me new music I haven’t yet heard.

My favourite driving CD would comprise the first four tracks of an EP by George Thorogood, including a version of Elmore James’s The Sky is Crying.

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