Dann, Trevor

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Dann, Trevor

PERSONAL:

Married; wife's name Maureen; children: Celia, Henry. Education: Attended Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University; University of Michigan, Executive Program, graduate.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cambridge, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, broadcaster, producer, and media consultant. Radio Nottingham, reporter and producer, 1974-79; Radio 1, producer, 1979-83; Whistle Test and Live Aid, producer, British Broadcasting Corporation Television (BBC TV), 1983-88; GLR (BBC radio station), managing editor, 1988-93; Confederate Broadcasting, owner and operator, 1993-96; BBC Music Entertainment, head, 1996-2000; Emap, manag- ing director of pop music, 2000-02; United Kingdom (UK) Radio Academy, director, 2006—. Classic Gold network, presenter of weekly show, BBC Radio 2, producer; Financial Times, BAA, and New Media Age magazine, producer of podcasts. Times (London, England) and Sunday Telegraph, former weekly columnist. Trevor Dann's Company, founder, 2002. Chairman, Ashwell Academicals FC, 1999-2006. Cambridge Regional College, tutor.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow, the Royal Society of Arts and the Radio Academy; winner of several Sony Awards for radio presentation and production; BAFTA, 1985, for Live Aid; Wesley Rose International Media Achievement Award, CMA, 1999.

WRITINGS:

Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake (biography), Da Capo Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including the Guardian, Independent, Evening Standard, Q, Music Week, Mojo, and Word magazine. Coauthor, Led Zeppelin: Concert File.

SIDELIGHTS:

Trevor Dann is a British writer and broadcaster who for several decades has been closely involved with successful radio and television programming of popular music shows. This includes his work for the 1985 Live Aid, a rock concert produced for famine aid in Ethiopia and shown worldwide via satellite. With Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake, the successful producer turned his hand to biography, writing about the British folk-rock legend Nick Drake, who died of a drug overdose in 1974 when he was just twenty-six years old and had only three albums to his credit.

As Travis Elborough noted in New Statesman, "In popular music, a premature death has long been a good career move." Since his death, Drake has taken on mythic proportions for a growing number of fans, and with Darker Than the Deepest Sea, Dann attempts to get to the heart of the mystery surrounding Drake's short musical career and his death. A critic for Kirkus Reviews found Dann's biography a "meticulous portrait of the gentle English singer/songwriter whose posthumous impact on the music world continues to gather force." The same reviewer further praised Dann's "in-depth familiarity with music history," calling Darker Than the Deepest Sea a "comprehensive overview." Pointing out that Drake makes for an elusive subject for the biographer (little is known about his private life, and he gave few interviews), Booklist contributor Jerry Eberle went on to observe, "Dann captures enough of the shadow … that we care when the light is extinguished and the shadow lost." Bill Walker, writing in Library Journal, also noted the research problem Drake presents the biographer, concluding, "Perhaps the best feature of this slim volume is the closing discography," which contains Dann's analysis and comments on all of Drake's songs.