I remember quite clearly when I first had access to the internet; it was in my first year of university. I didn’t really know what it was for. I had an email address and subscribed to various mailing lists, and used the web itself infrequently – this was back in the day when it would never have occurred to me to get my news from anywhere except Radio 4 and newspapers. I’d fallen out of love with music, too, and think I mainly used it for that most prosaic of reasons – to look up essays about James Joyce that I could plagiarise. It had no role as a communication tool at all – I didn’t send an email to a friend ’til after I graduated.
But I remember quite clearly an incident one weekend in the late 90s, when I was back in London to stay with my parents and get a home-cooked meal. We had the radio on, and were listening to a show presented by Charlie Gillett, who I had listened to, occasionally, all my life. My loyalties at the time lay with John Peel, Mark Radcliffe and Gary Crowley, and I found Gillett – who, like Andy Kershaw, played a lot of strange, exotic world music – a bit too ‘grown up’ and sophisticated for my tastes. But my parents used to play African music a lot at home, and I was powerless to deny the immediate, propulsive thrill of the music he played.
That weekend, back at home and enjoying my mother’s cooking, and well into the second bottle of wine of the evening, Charlie Gillett played a song which sounded truly wonderful. If you’re at all interested in music or British radio, you’ll know that Charlie died last week, and I hope you know what an enormous loss that was. I’m going to dig into my blog archive now, and quote myself, telling this exact same story, back in 2006, when I first learned that Charlie’s health was poor.
When I was a student, home from university one week, I sat in my parent’s kitchen, eating dinner and talking to my mum and dad, when a song from the radio behind us stopped us all in our tracks; it was the kind of song which you only hear every few years, something dynamic and surprising and new, and though I can’t now remember what the song was, I remember how I came to hear it and who was playing it. It was a song played by Charlie Gillett, world music specialist on what was then called GLR and is now BBC London 94.9. I remember particularly because although I missed him saying what the track was, I did notice him reading out an email address towards the end of the show. So I wrote a quick and fairly hopeful email asking if the song could be identified. I suppose I imagined some producer or tea-boy receiving it and digging through the playlists to answer my question.
What I received, very shortly afterwards, was an exquisitely polite and helpful reply from Charlie Gillett himself, expressing – absurdly, really – pleasure that I had enjoyed the show and identifying, and providing information on, the song in question. This struck me then, and now, as a surprising and generous gesture, much more so for this was well before the time when it became the norm for a radio show to interact with their listeners via email. Although I have lived for much of the time between then and now away from London, and have thus not followed his show closely, I have always had a particularly high opinion of the man, and an opinion which has heightened with each and every encounter of his show. He is, plainly, a true radical, never compromising his passion for music nor resting on his laurels when there is new music to be explored. It is plainly absurd that a DJ of his incredible originality and passion never made the leap to national radio (apart from the World Service), especially as he is a real trail-blazer in his field.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion that his charm might actually be best observed in the spartan surroundings of local radio. Unlike other DJs of his calibre, Gillett has always worked alone, producing his shows as well as curating them. He is the only radio presenter I have ever heard who played more records at the wrong speed, or failed to turn the volume up more often, than the famously shambolic John Peel. Somehow it would hard be hard to imagine him in the plush surroundings of radios 2 or 3. Like Peel he trades not on his smooth delivery or consistency, but rather on his insatiable curiosity and enthusiasm. His ‘Radio Ping Pong’, where he and a weekly guest cheerfully bat records spontaneously back and forth between the two, is a typically vibrant feature. I particularly remember Damon Albarn guesting last year and flumoxing Gillett with a series of increasingly erratic and arcane choices.
“Oh, you’ve got me confused now”, he eventually conceded.
I never expected a reply from Charlie, and I was honoured to receive one. Years later – after I wrote the paragraphs above – me and Dan went to Womad, in Reading. Charlie’s health was still precarious, and it seemed to be on everyone’s mind. Every artist seemed to mention him on stage. Little wonder.
Regular readers of this blog will associate my musical tastes much more closely with Damon Albarn than they will Charlie Gillett. But his relentless love of music and tremendously catholic taste was one of the sweetest gifts I ever encountered. He was a genuine hero. Here, by way of tribute, is the edition of Radio Ping Pong he co-hosted with Damon. Right click and ‘save target as’ to download.
Thanks, Charlie. In a small, important way, you changed my life.
Damon Albarn and Charlie Gillett, Radio Ping Pong, 2005.
1. Emmanuel Jal & Abdel Gadir Salim - Baai
2. Carol Fran - Tou' Les Jours C'Est Pas La Même / Coalishun - Thundah
3. Charlie and Damon
4. Assa'd Khoury - Ana Jar
5. Los Zafiros - Bossa Cubana
6. Oboto Sukuma - Nakatiye
7. K'naan - Hoobale
8. Miow People (field recording by Damon) / Arto Tuncboyaciyan - Dear My Friend Onno
9. Mehr Ali & Sher Ali Qawaali - Man Kunto Maula
With love.
