Charlie Gillett
| Charlie Gillett | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Charles Thomas Gillett |
| Born | 20 February 1942 |
| Origin | Morecambe, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 17 March 2010 (aged 68) |
| Occupation(s) | Musicologist, writer, radio presenter, record producer |
| Years active | 1972–2010 |
| Website | charliegillett |
Charles Thomas "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.
Gillett was born in Morecambe, Lancashire, England, and was brought up in 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 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 also 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 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 and New Musical Express and contributed to The Observer. Writer Richie Unterberger said of The Sound of the City that it "was the first serious and comprehensive history of rock & roll, and remains one of the best."
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