After Playback, where else can you send your tape? John Peel scratches his chin and tells Jon Lewin what he wants...

The number of tapes I get each week varies, but I suppose from all sources, all countries, it must be in the region of 100. Which is too many to listen to, really. If I did nothing but listen to tapes I might keep up with it, but with listening to records, doing radio programmes, eating, sleeping, going to the lavvy, I just don't have enough time.

I get three or four a week from Japan, a lot from America, a lot from Germany and Holland obviously, because of my shows there... I had a tape from Bangladesh recently, though that was rather disappointing — some Bangladeshi bloke who'd listened to one too many Dire Straits records. But I'm no more likely to listen to them if they come from abroad.

Because it's impossible to listen to them all, the matter of selection becomes rather arbitrary. For example, The Men They Couldn't Hang I listened to because I saw their tape on John Walters' desk and I liked their name. Terry & Gerry I noticed on top of a box full of tapes I'd packed up: Terry and Gerry were the names of my wife's best friends at college, and played such a large part in our domestic mythology that any ensemble by that name was bound to get a hearing. Pigbros I listened to because my wife's nickname is The Pig. It's shocking really, but in the absence of a system, there it is.

My requirements for tapes are rather different from most other people's, in that I'm not particularly concerned about presentation. But I do prefer the tape to come in a box, just for storage purposes, otherwise they tend to get lost.

Lyrics I always throw in the bin. Photographs of moody youths leaning against fire escapes go straight in the bin. Because I get so many tapes, I actually have to pay someone to come in about once a week just to unpack them all and put them into boxes, just so I can get them all home. So what I need is all the information on one sheet of paper that I can fold up and stick in with the tape. Great unwieldy sheets of stuff which stick out tend to get separated, leaving you with an unidentifiable tape. There was one case — only one, though — of a band I would have booked if I had known who they were, if their papers hadn't got lost.

It doesn't matter how many songs there are on the tape. There's no hard and fast rule, as it depends on how much it's interesting me. If 30 seconds or a minute reveals nothing, or if it's a heavy metal band, something which I have no knowledge or understanding of, that's it. But if it's interesting, I'll listen to the whole thing. You have to bear in mind the possibility that whoever is listening to it might actually enjoy it.

With the major record companies, where presentation is all, they listen to tapes as a marketing exercise. I listen, for... well... actually pleasure rarely comes into it, but when it does, it's of such an extreme nature that I'm quite happy to listen to a dozen songs.

As for the question of what I'm listening for... obviously I want to hear something that I enjoy, but it should be something that I can't immediately say 'Ooh, they've been listening to whatever' about. For two years there were so many Sons of Joy Division tapes; then it was Sons of Killing Joke, and The Cure; now it seems to be more directionless. You get the occasional Smiths soundalikes (some of them are quite good, actually), but there's no strong sense of direction like there was in the days of the Joy Division clones. And the wider the choice of music, the longer it sustains my interest. There's the quality of the unexpected.

There are things that I don't want to hear: any song titles that go "Blank Blank Woman", and the tape goes in the bin. The same goes for titles with "Rock & Roll" in them, with the honourable exception of the Ramones. I get a lot of letters from singer/songwriters. Something to avoid at all costs is starting your letter with 'I have been singing my own songs now for 18 years...'; that combination of words is enough to get your tape thrown out straight away.

I'm not particularly concerned about the sound quality of the tapes I receive. Obviously a cassette player at the back of a youth club isn't much use as you need to be able to hear the individual instruments. But that's all you really need.

About one in three of the groups we have in session is by a relatively 'unknown' band, someone we've picked up from a demo tape. But we used to have three sessions a week, and we now have only two. When we were cutback, we lost a quarter of the airtime, and one third of the sessions.

I'd like to put more new bands on, but I have to compromise a little by playing groups that the listeners already know, even though sometimes their sessions might not be all that stimulating — after they've done two or three, bands tend to think that they've got an automatic right to be on the radio, and because I'm such a softie, I find it difficult to put them off. Walters is much better at that...

This has been a good year. A lot of the bands that I've heard as a result of demo tapes have gone onto do really good sessions — The Passmore Sisters, Pigbros. Basically, I just like to hear something I've not heard before, something without traceable influences, in a cassette box, with just the name and address on it. That's all.