Charlie Gillett
British radio presenter and musicologist, 1942-2010
Charles Thomas Gillett (; 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.
Biography
Gillett was born in Morecambe, Lancashire, England, and was brought up in Stockton-on-Tees, where he attended Grangefield Grammar School. 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 City to study for a master's degree, taking as his thesis — unconventionally for the time — the history of rock and roll music.
After he returned to England in 1966, he taught social studies and film-making at Kingsway College of Further Education in central London, while starting to turn his thesis into a book. He began in journalism in 1968 with a weekly column in the Record Mirror. His 1970 book, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, was developed from his master's thesis, and was a seminal history of popular music. It received excellent reviews in both Time 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, and New Musical Express and contributed to The Observer.
The public source identifies “Charlie Gillett” as british radio presenter and musicologist, 1942-2010. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Charlie, Gillett and British.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charlie Gillett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.