My Charlie Gillett Experience.

AllOurMusicalWorlds
WereHisVille


I started this little F-Troop listed blog back in the dinosaur days just before the collective wave of Left Blogistan, as Jane Hamsher saw it, crested.

Back then I used to whip up my posts in the early mornings, often before work, down in the unfinished basement of the rickety old row house we lived in (and loved) at the time.

It was dark and a little dank, and the furnace was a bizarre natural gas conversion that consisted of a giant boiler-like thing that looked like a metal octopus with its mass of vent arms running off in all directions.

But I liked it down there. And we had just gotten decent broad band which meant that I could listen to the BBC World Service every morning as the sun came up while I typed, furiously, on my then still spiffy G3 Mac.

And the guy I liked to hear most on the Beeb was an old guy with a scratchy voice and a weird British accent that I couldn't quite place.

This was Charlie Gillett, who by then was pretty much obsessed with World Music.

And his obsessions, not to mention his enthusiasms were infectious.

As the Interwebz continued to open up, particularly from an audio perspective, I sought out Mr. Gillett more sporadically through the years until he died, sadly, of a horrible autoimmune disease that attacks the blood vessels in 2010.

After that I missed him and sometimes sought out archived versions of his old shows in the same way I do with the work of those wacky MIT-trained brothers from Boston who used to fix cars and make people laugh or a living.

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Anyway.

Fast forward to last week when I got on a wee bit of a Mark Knopfler binge thanks to the interests of the Doctors of Distortion's real guitar player.

And, as is my nature given my own obsessions, this eventually led me to the original Dire Straits demos recorded in the summer of 1977, before the group even had a record contract.

Those demos were born fully realized and they are truly amazing...

And it turns out that the person who is perhaps most responsible for the entire planet, including a then teenaged me half a pre-digital world away, becoming gobsmacked by the Sultans and all that followed was a then still youngish fellow named...

...Charlie Gillett:

...The demo tapes were given to BBC Radio London DJ Charlie Gillett. Charlie played the tapes calling upon record company executives to sign this new band: enter John Stainze and Ed Bicknell. It is said that Phonogram A&R man Stainze was in the shower listening to the radio when he first heard Dire Straits. A few weeks later he signed the band to Phonogram's Vertigo label and Mark secured a publishing deal with Rondor Music. Towards the end of 1977 Ed Bicknell was working at the NEMS agency when he got a call from Stainze asking him to fix up some gigs for Dire Straits. Ed was invited round to Phonogram's offices in December where he heard the Charlie Gillett demo tapes. He was then taken to Dingwalls Club in North London to meet Dire Straits. The date was the 13th of December, 1977, and as he walked into the club they were playing Down To The Waterline. Ed recalls, "The first thing I noticed was that it wasn't necessary to stand at the back of the room; they were very quiet.

I'd just done The Ramones, who were deafening......The second thing I noticed was that Mark was playing a red Stratocaster, which immediately made me think of Hank Marvin, who I had idolised in the sixties." After hearing two or three numbers Ed decided that he wanted to manage the band. He was organising a tour for Talking Heads and was able to put his new band on the bill as the support act. Dire Straits were paid £50 per night for the Talking Heads tour; a ten-fold increase from their fee at Dingwalls. The rest - as is often said - is history...


Imagine that!


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And just a quick note for anyone who actually bothered to click through to some of the ancestral posts linked to at the top of the page...This place really was a filled to bursting with sloppy drum comments in the old days, pre-Twittmachine...Alas, sadly, all that disappeared in the great Haloscream chainsaw comment massacre of late 2009....

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