Even Martin Amis would flash one of his expensive smiles if he were offered £1.5m to write a book. That’s how much John Peel has just busked for his autobiography — not bad for a first-time author.

“I thought my literary agent was taking the piss,” says the DJ. This, though, was serious business: Transworld, which signed him, even placed a newspaper advertisement begging him not to choose HarperCollins. “I’m not paid vast sums like Chris Tarrant and Chris Evans — you have to be called Chris to get that money.”

As he gave first breaks to some of the wealthiest wazzocks in rock, perhaps his windfall is overdue compensation to the most tortured eardrums outside an Iraqi prison cell. He admits to drooling at a TVR showroom, but he will spend only a tiny fraction (he is, improbably, a fanatical collector of ancient coins). The bulk, sombrely, he will put aside for the anticipated widowhood of his wife Sheila.

But will his publisher recoup its investment? One who dropped out at £1.1m suggests Transworld paid too much. But if another literary leviathan, Sir Alex “I’m not going to talk about that” Ferguson, is worth £1.2m, what price national treasure John Peel? True, he’s 63, been happily, boringly, married for nearly 30 years, his biggest showbiz chum is the “fantastically uncool” Delia Smith and he admits to “looking like a minicab driver”. He’s a self-styled “D-list celebrity”. In truth, though, you need to be pretty A-list to be that self-deprecating. His Radio 1 show attracts the most young listeners, while his Radio 4 slot Home Truths endears him to their parents.

Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons prove you can sell loads of books, mainly to people who don’t like reading very much, if you wax romantic in a suitably laddish way about the poetry of pop. So who could make a more popular pensmith than the man who discovered Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols and Pulp? A lot of top bands need to have passed his old grey beard test — so many that he is comfortable to admit that he rejected demo tapes from U2 and Bruce Springsteen “because I thought they were crap and still do”.

There is also a sadder, seamier side to Peel that should provide obligatory scandal for the book promo. As a 26-year-old DJ in Texas, underage girls apparently queued outside his studio to offer him oral sex. One, Shirley Anne, became the first Mrs Peel at the age of 15 (Peel says she lied about her age) and later attempted suicide. This episode in his life may raise uncomfortable questions.

“Well of course I didn’t ask for ID,” he says casually. “The interesting thing, seeing as you ask, was most were into heavy petting, and penetration was a rarity. But heavy petting was okay with me. Some, I don’t know what age they were. A lot of 14-year-old girls in Dallas were getting married.”

So have we grown too fixated with the concept of old men preying on young girls? Peel is clearly not insensitive to the political correctness of today. “I was just having a glass of red wine in a pub the other day, reading Private Eye, and there were kids playing. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s really nice — summer’s day, kids bowling around’ — and then I thought, ‘I’d better not look’. You know, ‘old bloke looking at children’.”

Mention of Shirley Anne makes him sombre. “I don’t like talking about it because she has children who are still alive, and I feel desperately sorry for them, though I don’t know them. I’ve not put it behind me because that would be selfish.

“You know what 15-year-olds are like, the horrors of puberty. It was unfair on her; unfair on me. She had a lot of changing to do. It was destined not to work.”

One might think that he, being older, bore more responsibility. “It wasn’t a happy time for me, it was infinitely less happy for her. I don’t think it would be fair on these children to slag off their mother.”

They divorced in the early 1970s. What became of her? “Her life spiralled out of control. Desperately unhappy, her life ended tragically early.”

Raking over conquests might also upset Germaine Greer — who retaliated after his claim that she virtually forced him to have sex by insisting he almost gave her gonorrhoea. “Actually, it was nonspecific urethritis which can, once you’ve got it, be triggered by a bad cold or even a hot curry,” he says. Quite innocent, then. “Well it wasn’t initially, but once you’ve got it, it’s a bugger to get rid of.”