... and to underline the diversity of the genres Peel championed: he was both one of the main early radio promoters of punk, but just a few earliers had championed Tangerine Dream's Phaedra as one of his favorite albums of the year.

I think that if you wanted to try and come up with a simple way to describe what connected all the music that Peel championed over his long career, it would have to be something like "new energy". He didn't seem as interested in what a band actually sounded like as where their energy came from and what level it was on.