Charlie Gillett

Charlie Gillett (/ˈɡɪlᵻt/; 20 February 1942 – 17 March 2010) was a British radio presenter, musicologist and writer, mainly on rock and roll and other forms of popular music. He was particularly noted for his influential book The Sound of the City, for his promotion of many forms of "world music", and for discovering and promoting such acts as Dire Straits and Ian Dury.

.....As a teenager he developed a love of music as well as sport, before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to take a degree in economics. In 1965, after graduating and marrying, he went to Columbia University in New York to study for a Master's degree, taking as his thesis — unconventionally for the time — the history of rock and roll music[....] His 1970 book, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, developed from his Master's thesis, was a seminal history of popular music. It received excellent reviews in both Time magazine and The New York Times and enabled Gillett to further his music journalism career and to write a second book, Making Tracks. He wrote for a variety of music magazines including Rolling Stone, Let It Rock, New Musical Express and contributed to The Observer.

Links to Peel
As a critic and broadcaster, Charlie Gillett became influential in the 1970s by challenging the dominance of progressive music, as promoted by Melody Maker, Sounds and the BBC's Sounds Of The Seventies programmes. He preferred singles to LPs and insisted that pre-Beatles pop should be taken seriously, playing the music he preferred on his show on BBC Radio London, Honky Tonk, which ran from 1972 to 1978 and developed a keen following. It isn't known whether Peel was one of his listeners, but certainly he shared Gillett's liking for late 1950s and early 1960s rock, pop and R&B.

Gillett also ran Oval Records, whose releases Peel played, and gave airtime on his shows to artists who would later become regulars in Peel's playlists, including Graham Parker, Elvis Costello and Ian Dury. He was also a pioneer of World Music and was among the group who coined the genre's name in 1987.

Peel admired Gillett, as he recounted on the show of 19 August 2003, after meeting his colleague at the Big Chill Festival: "I was very pleased because I got to meet up - which I far too rarely do - with Charlie Gillett, who is a man I admire enormously. Envy, actually, I have to say, because we've grown old together and Charlie looks kind of craggy but he looks great. He's got a mass of silver hair he just looks like he used to when he was in his twenties but older. Whereas I look like a pudding. So I look at him and think why couldn't that have happened to me?"

In 2006, Charlie Gillett was awarded the John Peel Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music Radio by the Radio Academy.

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