Ed Gillett Interview
Ed Gillett is a writer from South London. His first book is Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain. Dan Hancox calls it “a landmark book, and a reminder that the dancefloor is always political.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
So my career path’s been a bit wonky: I studied English at university, and edited the music section of my student newspaper, but somehow journalism never really registered with me as a viable life option. I sometimes think that if I could have a professional do-over, that’s the one thing I’d change, but I guess I’d also have missed out on a bunch of stuff that’s (hopefully) given my writing a slightly different perspective.
Instead of going straight into journalism, my first proper job was at a human rights NGO called Liberty, headed at the time by the lawyer Shami Chakrabarti. I ended up spending ten years working full-time in the charity sector: I loved the organisations I worked for, the people I worked with and the causes I was working towards, but in terms of the actual day-to-day roles I was doing, I never quite found the right fit.