The former editor of Observer Music Monthly remembers music writer and DJ Charlie Gillett, who died last week aged 68.

Caspar Llewellyn Smith 

The Observer, Sunday 21 March 2010 

A world of difference

He wasn’t mainstream, he loved and promoted what is loosely and wrongly-termed ‘world music’.
His weekly, 26-minute World of Music programme on the BBC’s World Service was everything that the WS stands for.
Quirky, authoritative, always interesting and entertaining and never patronising.
He would listen to anything from anywhere; a weird Russian jazz band here, a mid-European klezma group there, Sufi prayers, and of course the kaleidoscope of sounds that endlessly pour out of Africa.
Often you hadn’t a clue what the song was about, but you could bounce along to the joy and enthusiasm or wallow in the soulful sounds of loss and longing.
I can easily overlook the fact that in his long career he discovered Dire Straits and his record company was responsible for Paul Hardcastle because of what else he also introduced us to.
Many people rightly mourned the passing of Radio 1 DJ John Peel and remarked how his influence went beyond a simple radio show and had actually changed popular culture and attitudes. The same can be said of Charlie Gillett.

Charlie Gillett, Disc Jockey and Historian, Dies at 68

NY Times by DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: March 20, 2010
Charlie Gillett, who turned his youthful zeal for rock ’n’ roll into an influential career by writing one of the first serious rock histories and, as a disc jockey in London, helping to discover talents like Dire Straits and introduce the new genre of world music, died on Wednesday in London. He was 68.
The British Broadcasting Corporation said he had suffered from an autoimmune disease and died of a heart attack.
As a broadcaster, journalist, author and musicologist, Mr. Gillett (pronounced GILL-et, with a hard G) strove to bring deeper, broader dimensions to people’s appreciation of popular music. His book “The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll” (1970) described how rock evolved from more or less authentic regional styles recorded by independent companies to a vast, homogenized business ruled by major labels.
When the book was published in the United States by Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, Time magazine called it the “best history of rock yet published.” It remains in print (it is currently available from Da Capo Press) and has sold more than 250,000 copies.
In the 1970s, Mr. Gillett was the first disc jockey to play music by Graham Parker, Elvis Costello and Dire Straits. By the time he had finished playing Dire Straits’s unreleased “Sultans of Swing” for the first time in July 1977, record executives called to express interest. Two months later, the band signed with Phonogram Records and went on to global success.
On Thursday, The Associated Press quoted Mr. Costello as saying that Mr. Gillett in 1976 played unreleased tracks of a record Mr. Costello had produced at home, leading to a contract with Stiff Records the next year.
“I will always be grateful for those few curious minutes when I sat with my head cocked like Nipper the Dog at the improbable sound of my own voice coming out of a radio speaker,” he said.
Arguably, though, Mr. Gillett’s great achievement was shepherding the eclectic potpourri of musical strands emerging from Africa to Latin America to Eastern Europe to East Asia. He was one of a group of 15 or 20 record executives, journalists and others who met in a London pub in 1987 for the purpose of naming a musical form whose adherents range from a Belgian brass band in Brazil to a Toronto-based former child soldier from Somalia turned rapper. Record stores were clueless about how to identify this stunningly murky genre.
The term “world music” bested competing phrases like “world beat” and “international pop.” An important point, Mr. Gillett suggested, was that world music is urban, not rural — even though it might rise from rural traditions, as did American rock.
Mr. Gillett began playing world music on the radio in the 1980s and went on to become a force in its spread through his role as host of a BBC world music show and the annual release of a two-CD collection of world music songs.
Al Angelero, a disc jockey who has played world music for Radio Soleil d’Haiti in New York and other American stations for 25 years, said that Mr. Gillett’s presentations had fueled the genre’s rise in prominence.
“He had a mind that put it all together,” Mr. Angelero said in an interview on Friday. “He was not compartmentalized. You never knew what was coming next.”
Mr. Gillett’s other musical activities included managing Ian Dury, the English singer, lyricist and bandleader, and starting a record company, Oval Music, whose first recording was “Another Saturday Night” (1990), a collection of songs by Louisiana artists that was credited with bringing Cajun music to England. His book “Making Tracks: Atlantic Records and the Growth of a Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry” was published in 1974.
Charles Thomas Gillett was born in Morecambe, a town within the city of Lancaster, England, on Feb. 20, 1942, and graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in economics. For his thesis at Teachers College of Columbia University, he wrote about the history of rock music. It became his first book.
In an interview with the world music magazine fRoots in 2004, he said he chose the topic “as a way of rationalizing to myself that I hadn’t misspent my entire youth listening to records to no purpose.”
Mr. Gillett then taught social studies and filmmaking at an adult-education college in London. After “The Sound of the City” was published, he was hired to appear on a music panel show on television. He began his career as a disc jockey in 1972 as host of the show “Honky Tonk” on Radio London. He later worked for Capital Radio and had various radio shows on the BBC.
Mr. Gillett is survived by his wife, the former Buffy Chessum; his daughters, Suzy and Jody; his son, Ivan; and two grandchildren.
His enthusiasm for music did not affect his critical judgment. Though he always said one of the thrills of his life was seeing Buddy Holly perform in 1958, he wrote in “The Sound of the City” that Holly stopped being a true rock ’n’ roll artist before he died the next year. He had turned, Mr. Gillett said, into a sentimental pop singer.

 Published: 12:59PM GMT 18 Mar 2010

Gillett, who was 68 and was credited with discovering Dire Straits, had a lengthy radio career with a devoted following recruited during his stints on BBC London - and its predecessors - plus Radio 3, the World Service and Capital.
The presenter, who also managed Ian Dury for a spell and was respected for an authoritative book on the history of rock'n'roll, was described today as ''an inspiration to everybody who loved music''.
The broadcaster died in a London hospital yesterday. He suffered a heart attack last week after contracting a disease of the autoimmune system.
Gillett, who was born in Morecambe, Lancs, stepped down from his regular slot on Radio 3's World on 3 for health reasons two months ago.
He is credited with discovering Dire Straits in 1976 after playing Sultans of Swing from the band's demo tape on his influential BBC Radio London show Honky Tonk.
Gillett also championed world music stars like Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita and the young singer of Portuguese fado music, Mariza.
During the past decade he entertained millions of listeners through his World Service programme, Charlie Gillett's World of Music.
World Service director Peter Horrocks said: ''His broadcasts brought together music and radio fans from far-flung corners of the globe. He was a very special broadcaster and he will be sorely missed.''
Gillett presented Honky Tonk between 1972 and 1978.
He then moved to Capital Radio with his show Undercurrents which also featured world music. He was sacked in 1983, but brought back by public demand and stayed until 1990.
Gillett wrote an acclaimed history of rock'n'roll, The Sound of the City, in the 1970s which had been based on the thesis he wrote for his masters at New York's Columbia University.
Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3, said: ''News of Charlie's death is terribly sad. To his audiences he was 'Mr World Music' and the community of listeners is left richer for his tireless support of an extraordinary range of artists.
Chris Difford of the band Squeeze also paid tribute today. He said: ''Charlie Gillett was a good friend, a big fan of Squeeze and a wonderful sweet man - not many of them left in the world. So sad to lose him.''
Friend and colleague Robert Elms, a presenter for BBC London 94.9, said: ''Charlie was an inspiration to everybody who loved music, and a lovely bloke with it.
''His enthusiasm was boundless and his knowledge profound, but he only ever used that wealth of knowledge to excite and inspire. Nobody I have ever met had more songs in their heart than Charlie.''
Radio 2's Bob Harris said: ''He was a genuine inspiration - a true music lover and a really good guy. Very few have been blessed with his knowledge, talent and feel for what was right. It's really difficult to find words.''
Close pal Mark Lamarr said: ''When I first met him it was like meeting the rock 'n' roll equivalent of Dickens or Shakespeare.''
Gillett is survived by wife Buffy and children Suzy, Jody and Ivan.

'When I play a new album,’ says Charlie Gillett, 'I want to be surprised, to be completely captivated by the music - the way we all do. I don’t think I’m demanding anything unusual.’ Silver-haired and sixty-seven with a hint of Geordie lurking beneath his warm, avuncular tones, the veteran world music DJ must be the best known British broadcaster never to have had a proper national radio show. Through 37 years of programmes, principally on local London stations - beginning with soul and blues, but increasingly branching out into global sounds - he’ s built up a passionately partisan following; with an appeal based largely on the idea that he is just another listener.
Yet anyone listening to 'Otro Mondo’, the latest of Gillett’s annual 'Sound of the World’ compilations, will find themselves immediately questioning that notion. As world music critic of this newspaper I’ve actually heard most of the music on the expertly sequenced double album before. Yet hearing it again via Gillett’s ears it sounds completely unfamilar. I’d heard the music, but not the way Gillet did.
'The advantage of being a DJ is that you can hone in on things you might miss if you just put an album on and let it play.’ Indeed, if playing records all day sounds a wonderfully casual way to make a living, Gillett doesn’t see it that way. 'Discipline is the key to the key to the way I listen to music. It always has been.’ Having grown up in the golden age of the single, Gillett appears to still regard the whole idea of the album with bemusement. On a permanent search for the stand-alone, killer track, his trick is to place such moments in delightfully unlikely juxtapositions that reveal unexpected dimensions in the music - whether it’s the Gangbe Brass Band’s voodoo oompah flowing into Saban Bairamovic’s wheezy Bosnian balladry, or the transition between Damon Albarn’s exquisitely melancholy 'Hong Kong’ and Felix Lajko’s turbo-charged Hungarian violin. It’s hardly surprising that the 'Sound of the World’ albums have become accepted as the best guides to what’s happening in this frighteningly multifarious field.
Gillett got his foot in the door of DJing and music journalism as a pundit, through 'The Sound of the City’, his authoritative and still highly regarded study of Afro-American music. But having been gradually converted to global sounds - with his pivotal epiphany occuring at Youssou N’Dour’s first London performance in 1984 - he has staunchly refused to play the role of world music expert.
'It was possible at one point to be familiar with every producer and song writer in American soul music. But no one could hope to have that depth of knowledge across the immense breadth of styles that’s become known as world music. And I’ve realised it isn’t necessary to.’ While other world music gurus play the role of explorer, searching out esoteric sounds in impossibly remote climes, Gillett’s self image is of someone calmly sitting in his notional DJ booth, acting is a filter for the mountains of mind-bogglingly diverse material piling up on his doorstep.
But how, over the decades, has he managed to maintain his original wide-eyed enthusiasm apparently undimmed?
'It’s largely by default,’ he says. 'I still listen to all the supposedly cutting-edge new pop. But whether it’s Fleet Foxes or the Dirty Projectors, the things other reviewers find remarkable I just don’t get. Whereas, I sincerely believe that all the music on the new 'Sound of the World’ album is extraordinary. The track by Gaada Diwan de Bechar, for example’ - built around a brooding Algerian woman’s voice - 'is as good as anything I’ve heard in years.’ While Gillett is unstintingly generous in his support for things he believes in, he has a puritanical compuction - born perhaps of his Northern English roots - to be nothing less than frank about what he doesn’t like.
And being Gillett, he somehow gets away with it.
The Spanish group Ojos de Brujo, for example, far from bridling at his criticism of their live shows, turned up at his house - en route from Heathrow to Glastonbury - to find out what they were doing wrong. 'I gave them a little lecture in the garden,’ he says. Yet while they appeared receptive, 'the next time I saw them they were exactly the same.’ If Gillett’s attitude points to an element of endearing innocence in his character, then it is the fact that he has never allowed himself to become cynical that makes him such a rewarding musical guide.
'I just love this music for its own sake,’ he says. 'I don’t have any other agenda in presenting it. I genuinely believe it’s the best music there is.’