I reluctantly went along to a John Peel Day event in Central London a few weeks back. Commemorating the death of the great radio broadcaster five years ago to the month. I say reluctantly, the past few events I'd been to just seemed to be an excuse to trundle out endless indie nonsense.

I was honoured to know John and spent many hours in his company courtesy of the Peel Sessions at BBC Maida Vale, something I attended with alarming frequency due to my locality. Add to that, the infrequent record shopping trips in Soho and endless banter over e-mail and phone and I'm honoured to say he became a friend.

Of course I'm not going to pretend to be even remotely cool and laid back about it. It was a total buzz to know him like this. Having immersed myself in his personality and the music as a teenager, learning to understand that I wasn't meant to like everything on the show, even though he did. Providing a musical lifeline when our family upped sticks and moved to the countryside. My measurement of how good the area is was based on the number of decent record shops operating (Shropshire had fuck all). Needless to say I didn't hang around for too long.

To go from being a listener to being a regular contact on the show once he embraced e-mail to ending up inside Studio MV4 was pretty thrilling. So his death, which fell on the day before my birthday, left me totally floored and even though time has helped, I still find it difficult to retain composure if I think about John too much (hence my reluctance to previously blog about it).

So the question I initially had was how to commemorate him, this has now changed to should we even bother?

His former employees, the BBC, have pretty much abandoned the idea of commemorating John and his work and despite my initial anger at this decision, clarity from a former colleague of his did seem to make sense. The BBC and in particular Radio 1 has changed dramatically since the passing of John. Partly due to the media landscape and partly due to the BBC itself.

Add to the fact that Radio 1 just simply doesn't speak to me anymore. Yes, I'm 36 years old, yes I hate most youth music and yes I spent a tortuous week listening to the bloody thing before I made that comment. The conclusion that I can come to is that the BBC aren't probably the best people to handle this task. Their idea of commemorating him would probably have amounted to them playing 'Teenage Kicks' on a loop.

So what of the youth? Scanning the past few years worth of events, the endless MurdochSpace pages and listening to a shower of crummy online samples, I've come to the observation that most of these nights were simply your bog-standard indie night thinly disguised as commemorative tribute. Amusingly almost all used the same phrase along the lines of 'music that we're sure John would approve of'.

Just to be absolutely clear (and for those unfortunate enough not to know) John's shows were not just about indie music. Statistically speaking, dance labels like Planet Mu were higher up the rankings in terms of number of weekly plays. John's love of black music (reggae, roots, dancehall), electronic, techno, metal (death, speed, black and doom) and more recently the feverish movements of Dubstep and Grime meant that his shows retained an air of diversity. Not only in terms of musical substance, but also in terms of geographical origin and race.

I think my main problem with indie music is that I just find it a tad too....white.

Ultimately, the more I hear other people's idea's of what they think John will like, the more I miss him and his shows. Next time, I'll ignore these attempts at alignment and I'll just replay the personal tribute that I have in my head.

John Peel, 30 August 1939 – 25 October 2004