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Charlie Gillett im Radio: The Sound of the World
"Saturday Night": Weltmusik-Vielfalt aus London
Interview mit World Music DJ Charlie Gillett |
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 Sich als Moderator auf die Musikvielfalt einlassen, die Studiogäste in den Mittelpunkt stellen und Zeit haben, um Neues und Interessantes zu erfragen: Charlie Gillett verstand es exzellent, die Möglichkeiten des Radios kreativ zu nutzen. Mit Talent, Natürlichkeit und vielen Freiräumen begeisterte der Gewinner mehrerer Sony Awards die Hörerinnen und Hörer von BBC London in seiner wöchentlichen "Saturday Night".
Von 2003 bis 2006 war Charlie Gillett auch im deutschen Äther präsent: RBB Radiomultikulti und WDR Funkhaus Europa übernahmen das Programm in der WORLD MUSIC NIGHT. Grund genug für Hannah Tame, sich mit dem "Maverick DJ" über seine Sendung und vieles mehr zu unterhalten. Hier finden Sie das Gespräch in der englischen Originalfassung.
Charlie Gillett hat seine Sendung bei BBC London 94.9 FM Ende Mai 2006 aus gesundheitlichen Gründen aufgeben müssen. "Saturday Night" wurde zunächst von Gerry Lyseight präsentiert. Seit November 2006 nahmen wechselnde Gast-DJs die Hörer/-innen mit auf spannende musikalische Reisen um die Welt. Zwischenzeitlich moderierte DJ Ritu an diesem Platz die Sendung  Wide World - a fresh, contemporary mix of new releases and world music classics.
Im BBC World Service war Charlie Gillett weiterhin on air: in seiner halbstündigen wöchentlichen World Music-Show, die von zahlreichen Sendern weltweit übernommen wurde.
Charlie Gillett starb am 17. März 2010 in London.
Derzeit wiederholt BBC World Service am angestammten Sendeplatz ausgewählte frühere Folgen von Charlie Gillett's World Of Music. Die Sendungen sind nach der Radioausstrahlung für sieben Tage im Internet abrufbar (BBC iPlayer). |
HT: Outside of London you are not really that well known in the UK are you?
CG: Correct.
HT: So I am wondering, why don’t you have a national slot?
CG: I would love to have a national slot, but it just hasn’t worked out that way, I don’t know why. I kind of expected that at some point, because I have been doing this over thirty years now, that somebody would have come and said ‘Do you want to come and do this nationally?’ The problem at Radio 2 is, they are quite well disposed towards me, as far as I can tell, but they are not at all interested in me playing world music.
HT: Because you did do a programme on Radio 2 didn’t you?
| WORLD 2005 (Doppel-CD) |
Sound of the World
33 Artists from 28 Countries
(compiled by Charlie Gillett)
With Daby Balde, Camille, Lhasa, Chango Spasiuk, Darko Rundek, Oliver Mtukudzi, DJ Fitchie, Issa Bagayogo, Yasmin Levi, Mariza, Youssou N'Dour, Amadou & Mariam, The Chehade Brothers, Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté,...
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CG: Yes I’ve done quite a few, but I am having to sneak world music into those programmes, that’s not what they want me to do really. So if I were to continually do things that were about the history of western pop music as everybody knows it, then they would, I think, be quite happy for me to keep doing that. But I’m not interested in only doing that.
HT: I thought maybe it was to do with the fact that you like to be in control of what you play, and that at BBC London...
CG: Well, it is a valid point, and so I kind of console myself with the fact that at BBC London I can truly do whatever I want, the management doesn’t influence me, or try to, in any way, which is really unusual, I mean it’s nearly unique. I would imagine that John Peel has a similar freedom, Andy Kershaw does, Bob Harris on Radio 2 plays what’s called Americana, or something roughly like that, which is guitar rock oriented material, mostly from the states, some from Britain, and within that framework he can play what he wants. But in his case he is in a sort of category.
In general, no radio station likes to have their presenter be in complete control. So maybe your point is correct: if I were to agree to surrender to a producer who would come in and do something which is designed for me... but I don’t think it would be logical to choose me to be the front of such a programme, so I don’t think that it is really the case that if only I would agree to do that, there would be lots of work.
That’s not the kind of presenter I am, I am somebody who thinks on his feet, I am not very good at reading scripts, and I wouldn’t be very convincing introducing a record that I didn’t personally really like. You would hear it in my voice. Nevertheless, I do feel.. resentful, is not too strong a word, that I haven’t been given a chance to show what I can do, because when I have sat in for Bob Harris on his show, the feedback from his audience to what I do is incredible, so it’s not like I want to steal his programme or his audience at all, I just feel that I could do something on another night, and the same people that like him would also like what I do, and it is very different from him...
HT: You refer to yourself as a maverick DJ.
CG: Do I? Well, that’s only in the sense that the mavericks are the ones who just play what they want to play regardless of whether record companies are banging on their doors saying this is what we want you to play. I quite like the word maverick.
HT: How did the re-broadcast on Radio Multikulti come about?
CG: Yeah, I don’t know exactly how that came about. As you know, or maybe you don’t know, as well as Multikulti broadcasting in Germany, two of the guys there, Johannes Theurer and Tobias Maier coordinate a World Music Chart. They get in touch with about fifty or sixty DJs around Europe who are all with stations affiliated with the EBU, the European Broadcasting Union, and every month we send in a list of our ten best records of the moment. They collate this into an actual chart which then gets published.
So I have that kind of feedback with them, and then when WOMEX was in Berlin three years ago, seeing that Multikulti was going to be broadcasting from there, I asked them if I could come and sit with them in the two hours that were eight to ten on Saturday evening in London, and if we could kind of co-present a show which would come out on Multikulti and BBC London at the same time, in English.
HT: Oh right, so the German presenters spoke in English?
CG: Exactly, we did that three years ago, and then we did the same thing again in Essen. So there has been that physical contact, and we have seen what each other does, so I guess they know what I do from that. Although [
my show] goes out on BBC London, as we explained, it is really like a self-production, I am totally in charge of what happens. I think of it as my show and it goes out on BBC London, and so when they came to me and said ‘Can we do this?’ and I said ‘Yes’, they then said ‘Well who do we talk to at the BBC about this?’ and I said ‘You talk to me’, and he said, ‘No, we’ve got to have official approval from the BBC’. In the end when I talked to the management at BBC London they said ‘Just do it, let’s not get tangled up with bureaucracy here, you just do it and you liaise with them’, so that’s how it is, they have sort of turned a blind eye in effect.
HT: Do you get a lot of feedback from listeners on Multikulti?
CG: Not a lot, not even one a week at the moment, but I provide the playlists and people can get all the basic information that they want from websites and stuff, so there is less reason for people to come and chase me down and say ‘what was that?’ than there used to be. The normal reason for someone getting in touch was to ask ‘What was that that you played at twenty past eight..?’ It’s always interesting how they identify it, they might identify it by describing it itself, or they might say it’s the one after you played Joe Strummer.It is always quite important when you’re planning the show to have certain comfortable landmarks within the show, so that people feel, OK I know what this is. To have a two hour show where everything is unfamiliar is almost exhausting for people. There is a tendency, with so much stuff coming in, to just throw out, regurgitate the best of this week’s post. I don’t do that, I introduce some new ones, I re-play other things which I have recently played already, so that can be relatively comfortable because although it was new a month ago, they have heard it before maybe I played it twice and this is the third time, and that really consolidates the feeling Ah-ha! I know what this is. Also I play some records in English quite regularly so that people can again get their bearings for a while and feel comfortable, and then off we go into another little adventure. |
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