Charlie Gillet

Charlie Gillett is, without doubt, the dean of world and roots music radio presenters. Since 1983, before the genres even had names, he's been presenting this material, and now that his weekly Radio London show, London Live, is webcast, anyone, anywhere can hear his excellent taste in music. Or you can catch him presenting a different show on the BBC World Service. But although he's best known for his radio work, Gillett's been involved in almost every facet of music. He's managed bands, run a label, and even authored two books, including one of the seminal examinations of rock'n'roll, The Sound of the City, which was first published in 1970. And the book itself has an intriguing history.

"In 1965 I'd finished university in England, and gone to America thinking I'd like to get a Master's degree," Gillett recalled. "Theoretcially I understood the system, but I wanted to do the degree in a year, and the system was geared to a two-year or more period, paying $50 a credit, which is close to $5000 in today's terms. The one way around it would be a job which included tuition. I did manage to get one by a complete fluke. It was reading Time and Newsweek for political bias in their Latin American coverage for a sociologist called Herb Ganz, who was doing a study of unconscious bias in the American media. I had to pick out the adjectives ascribed to all the politicians from every Latin American country."

"I went from being a lecturer at a college to having at least one toe in the door of music."

Gillett also noticed that he could cut down on the number of classes needed by offering a thesis, and began racking his brains for ideas, and eventually came up with a study of rock'nroll and popular culture after talking with WBAI disc jockey Charles Hobson. Gillett wrote a very brief synopsis, which he left for his tutor. Hearing nothing, he set to work, and turned in the completed thesis (typed by a secretary who'd been horrified by Gillett's hunt-and-peck technique) the following May.

"I heard nothing from my tutor for an alarming amount of time, so eventually I called him to confirm he'd got my thesis. He said ‘I got something somebody left on my desk," and I replied, ‘What do you mean?' ‘I didn't authorize this subject," he told me, even though I'd left the treatment on his desk months earlier. He insisted I was supposed to talk to him about it and consult him. He'd made no attempt to track me down, and took an incredibly high-and-mighty attitude about it. To him, it was not the subject of a thesis. Finally he said that if he could find someone on the staff prepared to read it and offer an opinion, fine, otherwise I'd wasted my time. So I waited, and he found someone who passed it."

Returning to England, Gillett was filled with idea of turning his thesis into a book, but all the publishers he contacted turned him down. A year later, out of the blue, he received a letter from the U.S., written by the man whose secretary had typed the thesis, and who now ran a publishing house. Had Gillett ever considered turning that thesis into a book....? So "we then spent another year turning it into a book. The day it came out, Peter Guralnick, who wrote ‘Feel Like Going Home,' honed in on the same publisher saying he had a work that might interest them, so they had two of those things." The Sound of the City received glowing reviews in both Time and The New York Times, which "led to an author tour, one of the most exhilarating times of my life. And nothing has been the same since. I went from being a lecturer at a college to having at least one toe in the door of music. It's been the foundation of almost everything I've done, in a way."

But even as he worked on the book, Gillett's life was changing. In 1968, seeing classifieds for old rock'n'roll discs in Record Mirror, he wrote to the editor, who offered him a column that ran for the next few years. With The Sound of the City out, Gillett began work on a second book, Making Tracks, which he called "the ‘live version,' since I did The Sound of the City without speaking to many people in the industry. This was almost entirely from interviews with everyone involved with Atlantic, Stax and associated labels. As the proofs were passed around, someone did an advance review. He quoted Hy Weiss as saying ‘Payola? Best thing that ever happened to the record business. Instead of having to spend time with those schmuck DJs, you just paid them $50 and they played your record." Hy called me from America, amused, but hoped I'd said nothing about Arthur Prysock. He'd managed to make it look as if Prysock was selling a lot of records, which inspired MGM to buy Prysock's contract for a million dollars. MGM couldn't understand why they never sold any Prysock records afterwards. But of course it was in there; it was one of the funniest bits of the books. He said, ‘It's got to come out. I just re-signed Arthur and he doesn't know about that.' I said I couldn't take it out, and he threatened. So I had to tell the publishers to take the whole chapter out, which delayed publication by over a year. It took the heart out of my interest in writing books."

But by then other irons were in the fire - namely, a record label.

"I'd just started on the radio, and I was talking with Gordon, a neighbor of mine. I'd just come back from the research for Making Tracks. He wondered if there was anything else I could do, and I said start a label - which is what we did. We took a trip to Louisiana, chasing down all those records I'd heard and hadn't, from all kinds of labels. One label was very friendly, and let us take as many singles as we wanted, with a very reasonable deal. That gave us a margin to license the idea to someone else and still give us a margin."

The pair put together a running order for a compilation album, but before it could go any further, they became sidetracked - by music of course. By this time Gillett had a show on Radio London, which he began in 1972, after complaining about the blandness of the new BBC local stations in his weekly column in 1972.

"I'd been recommended to go and see Kilburn and the High Roads, and I raved about them on the radio a few times," he remembered. "Going to see them again, the singer (Ian Dury) suggested I manage them. So we threw ourselves into 18 months of that, which set Oval on the back burner. The Kilburns made an album, and on the day we handed it in, the label, a satellite affiliate of Warners, closed down. Although they let us have the masters, and we shopped it around to other companies, Ian lost heart and lost faith in us. Virgin were interested in taking the record, and Ian just said, ‘No I want to go with Pye Records, home of Max Bygraves.' He'd found another manager in that time.

So we went back to Virgin, and they said ‘We like you guys, do you have anything else?' So we dragged out this compilation of Louisiana material, and that was Another Saturday Night, the first Oval album in 1974, and included "Promised Land" by Johnnie Allan, which became a turntable hit, but only sold about 8000 singles."

"I'd abandoned the kind of rock'n'roll and soul, R & B thing, since I'd got to the end of my own interest, and I started playing a more accessible version of indie music than John Peel."

Life was good. Gillett had his show, the label was finally up and running. But it was about to change again in 1977, after he received a demo tape from a new band by the name of Dire Straits. "I thought it was too good not to play, so I shuffled things around and did play it on the radio, and it was the most eventful thing I've ever done. Three A&R people called up during the show and another after I got home. It was extraordinary. There were five songs on the tape and I played one a week."

Not long before that, Gillett had featured another unknown performer - Graham Parker. That brought only one A&R call, but it ended up in a record deal. Gillett was exposing important new artists, ones who'd make a real impact. But he was no longer so happy at Radio London.

"I was being paid £25 a week for doing this show, and it seemed out of proportion when I was breaking some fairly big artists. So I just stopped. Having done so I pulled together the demo tapes of the best bands and put them out as The Honky Tonk Demos. That includes the original demo of "Sultans Of Swing."

His timing for getting out of radio was good. He and his partner had become involved with a young saxophone player called Lene Lovich, and "gradually realized she could be an interesting singer as well. We did some demos, took them to a number of companies, including Stiff, where Dave Robinson sat listening to it with increasing impatience. Lene's songs were at the end, and he wanted to sign her, put her on tour immediately. We'd only done one track with her, so we had to do another for a single. Overnight she wrote "Lucky Number." Then he wanted an album, and we had three weeks to do it."

After being part of the Stiff tour, Lovich was booked in for her own dates around the country, and that meant another single, "so Dave took the album version of "Lucky Number," which was different from the original b-side, speeded it up, added an extra snare, put in a choir shouting "Number Two" and it was the follow-up on Stiff to Ian Dury's "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick," and it got to number three. So throughout 1979 we were running around with Lene. And the demo tape Dave hadn't liked got us a label deal and A&M, although we did nothing of real interest there."

In 1980, Capital Radio asked Gillett if he'd be interested in returning to the airwaves. "I'd abandoned the kind of rock'n'roll and soul, R & B thing, since I'd got to the end of my own interest, and I started playing a more accessible version of indie music than John Peel. Then I invited people like Sting, Adam Ant, and Paul Weller in to talk about their favorite music. Gradually I picked up the odd calypso or African record, but nothing very systematic. Then in 1983 the new head of the station fired me - the only time I've been fired in my life. The head of music called me up a few weeks later, saying they'd had a lot of complaints about me being gone. A few weeks later, he said he could get me back on, but it would have to be doing something different - did I have any ideas? I said that a lot of people had liked the ‘tropical' music I was playing, and I was quite happy to dive in with both feet and launch a show called ‘A Foreign Affair' and play what I know. What I didn't know I'd learn from the audience. So as far as he's concerned, I invented world music. But you surf a wave, if there is one. WOMAD had started, Stern's had just begun, Earthworks had started. And Island put out King Sunny Ade. In 1983 it all happened, and it 1984 it came to the surface with a number of incredible gigs in London. The rest of my life has flowed from those two years."

Indeed it has. 17 years later Gillett is still at it, breaking new artists from all over the globe, one of the most respected figures internationally on radio. He hears a lot, and he's noticed a number of changes over the last decade and a half.

"The difference now from those days is that back then there were some incredible, unknown artists, like Salif Keita, Youssou N'Dour - it was an artist-led movement. I wondered if we'd discovered these people at their peak, and I think they did make their great records then. They found much better studios, and they responded to the interest beyond their own borders. Now it's a song at a time. Having said that, the Buena Vista thing is extraordinary."

And how would he rate 2000 as a year for music?

"It hasn't been a vintage year, and there isn't one album I can sit and let play from start to finish and think ‘This is brilliant.' I like five or six tracks from Amadou and Mariam's record, where Amadou is singing. I love two or three tracks from Rokia Traore's ‘Wanita,' and the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou is amazing. Lo'Jo's album is good, and three tracks are outstanding."

One thing remains constant, however - Charlie Gillett is in love with music. "It's as interesting and exciting as ever," he observes, before adding, "but it lacks that charismatic performers that would make the rest of the world notice it." But everyone who hears him notices Charlie Gillett.

Charlie Gillet

"I went from being a lecturer at a college to having at least one toe in the door of music."

"I'd abandoned the kind of rock'n'roll and soul, R & B thing, since I'd got to the end of my own interest, and I started playing a more accessible version of indie music than John Peel."

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