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’s 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 an international 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 person 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.
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