FAREWELL, FRED DELLAR, BELOVED LEGEND OF THE MUSIC PRESS
“Best to just sit back, enjoy life and watch those late-night movies.” FRED DELLAR
FRED DELLAR’S crossword should be on this page. Until recently, he would also be hosting the Time Machine and Ask Fred sections, as well as sharing his expertise and taste as a reviewer. Each contribution was essential, as a lifetime of curation, data-gathering and enthusiasm came together in words guaranteed to inform and entertain. Sadly, Fred left us on May 15, just two weeks shy of his 90th birthday.
Born on May 29, 1931 in Willesden, north-west London, he recalled of his youth, “I spent all of my pre-teen years in a fish and chip shop – right up to the moment when a German bomb blew the roof off our Earlsfield establishment.” Called up to do his national service in 1950, he was posted to Bomber Command Headquarters at RAF High Wycombe, where he started a jazz club and booked bands including the 20-piece Toni Anton’s Progressive Orchestra. “I never saw the inside of an aircraft during the whole two years,” Fred quipped, “though I learnt to type properly.”
The skill would come in handy. A youth club DJ and lecturer, part-time “street skiffler” and habitué of nightspots including Willesden’s Club Satchmo, run by compere and promoter Bix Curtis (“he taught me so much about jazz,” Fred said), his love of music found an outlet in writing. As well as producing jazz fanzines, he had his first words published in Record Mirror in 1955. As Secretary of the Frank Sinatra Appreciation Society, he was one of the few invited guests present at the Chairman’s only British recording sessions, at Bayswater’s CTS studios in June 1962. As the ’60s gathered pace, he began contributing to Hi-Fi News and writing sleevenotes, the first being Jambo Caribe by Dizzy Gillespie in 1965. He also retained his invitation to a Sinatra reception, as if anticipating the future world’s appetite for documentary evidence of this golden time. He kept his back issues and updated his files, already accumulating the facts and analysis he would be celebrated for.
After being made redundant from his warehouse job in 1972, Fred applied to work at the NME, where he would remain until the mid-’90s. Immune from the year zero antagonism of punk – Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill famously bought him cakes – his roles included serving as deputy news editor, reviewing imports and demos, and interviewing artists including Tom Waits, Mama Cass, Stevie Wonder, Tangerine Dream and Daevid Allen. It was at NME that he hosted his Fred Fact column, an always genial outpost where readers could request discographies, have questions answered and pursue the kind of secret knowledge the pre-internet age did not give up easily. A 1989 three-part Fred Fact report on the Factory label was famously given its own Factory catalogue number – FAC227 – by Tony Wilson. He wrote books about Sinatra, country music and, the one he said he was most proud of, 1981’s The NME Guide To Rock Cinema. He also contributed to Smash Hits, The Wire, Vox, The Face and, later, Loaded.
IN 1996, Fred found a home at MOJO. As well as bringing his crisp prose and broad knowledge, he felt like an envoy from a legendary time in the music industry, having survived innumerable shifts in fashion and years of change in media and technology. But Fred wore it lightly, always. Smartly dressed, modest and self-deprecating, he was happiest sharing some fact or story about one of his many interests (which could be Peggy Lee or Mark Murphy, Frankie Lymon or the history of the Grand Ole Opry, the music of the Harlem Globetrotters or the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943), and recalling London’s bygone music scene and its characters. Friends including Roy Carr and Stan Britt, and the clubs, label offices and studios may have gone from the world, but they existed, still, in his memories.
It was frequently said in the MOJO office that he should get an OBE or something similar, but this was never his style. Instead, he lived a music life, never lost the thrill of his chosen subject, and worked hard sharing that thrill as long as he could.
Having sadly lost his wife Pam last year, Fred scaled back his writing. At home in Northampton, he wrote “best to just sit back, enjoy life and watch those late-night movies.” His final published crossword appeared in last month’s issue. Fred once described MOJO as “a magazine I love”, and the feeling was entirely mutual. We will miss this unique, universally liked and genuinely nice man more than words can say.
THE MOJO CROSSWORD WILL RETURN NEXT MONTH