The research team at Interactive Cultures were shocked to hear about the untimely death of our good friend David Sanjek. We have been working with David in a number of ways, and he was a really supportive voice in our endeavours. He was one of the great music and media scholars at Salford University, and we’d met up at conferences and seminars on a range of topics, pursuing many of them together.

Dave Sanjek on dums

I met David soon after he arrived in the UK to work at Salford, and we immediately hit it off. I already knew about his father’s definitive history of the US music industry, and that David had helped with an updated version of the publication.  Within a few minutes, though, our conversations were off in many different directions. We immediately discovered we had many passions in common, but he seemed to know so much more about things I only had noticed, or he offered such an interesting left-field take, that I was intrigued. As part of the burst of intellectual energy that emanates from Salford we were in frequent contact, and the events at the university always served as stimulus for some interesting debate, often leading to a whole line of unexpected discussions which took us late into the night.

He was also kind enough to say positive things about our team at BCU, and delighted that we turned up en masse to events he’d organised or co-organised. It was great to be involved in fairly recent public seminars and conferences around Northern Soul, the work of Tony Palmer, and popular music on television and in film. Along with Ben Halligan, Dave had welcomed a range of contributions from IC members to the Sights and Sounds conference and book.  Our conversations always threw up new possibilities for further collaboration, and now sadly none of these is possible. We were working together on an edited book on Northern Soul, which I must now complete alone.

I have always been attracted to independent thinkers, and David personified that concept.  I loved his paper at Sights and Sounds about why the Medicine Ball Caravan, the cult hippie rockumentary, didn’t work, and that his take on Northern Soul re-re-located its sounds back into US music culture. He was as happy writing about musical theatre as about Jimmie Rodgers, Frank Zappa or Jump Blues, and as adept at eulogising about the magic of the music experience as he was at detailing its economic structure or the issues of music IP.

Dave Sanjek, you were a great friend to Interactive Cultures and you will not be forgotten.

Professor Tim Wall