Veteran radio broadcaster and music DJ John Peel has died suddenly in Peru from a heart attack. He was 65.
He was on holiday with his wife Sheila in the city of Cuzco.
Peel was one of the greatest influences of British pop music, starting in the Sixties and still playing new and experimental music in recent weeks on his weekday Radio 1 show.
He went on to become a broadcasting legend, famous for championing new bands and music genres long before they crossed over into the mainstream.
In 1998, Peel starting presenting the award-winning Radio 4 programme Home Truths about the ups and downs of family life.
He was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting in the same year.
Born in 1939 in the Wirral, John Robert Parker Ravenscroft adopted the surname Peel during his pirate radio days.

On finishing his military service in 1962, he went to Texas and began working for WRR radio in Dallas.
For the next three years he moved around America working for various radio stations.
He started his Radio 1 career in 1967 when he returned to London, establishing himself with the show Top Gear.

The legendary DJ began as a broadcaster in the US in the Sixties, and came back to Britain to become a pirate DJ, playing music from new acts such as the Small Faces and Pink Floyd.
He was a friend of stars of that time such as Marc Bolan, and played with Rod Stewart on the song Maggie May on Top of the Pops on one occasion in the early Seventies.
Peel was among the first DJs to understand the impact of punk rock, playing the Ramones, the Clash and the Sex Pistols on Radio 1 before any other mainstream presenter.
He encouraged bands such as the Smiths, the Cure, Pulp, Keane, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Undertones, Joy Division and more recently the White Stripes.
Peel also played reggae and hiphop ahead of any other British DJ, and many modern rock stars owe a part of their success to him.