Greg Quill Entertainment Critic and Australian Star Has Died

I knew Greg Quill, initially as a member and lead vocalist with the Australian roots rockers, Country Radio and their hit single, Gypsy Queen. I later got to know him during my years at A&M Records as a rock critic with the Toronto Star. If you are unfamiliar with that band, I am posting a video below the bull obituary below.

Michael

Greg Quill, an acclaimed Australian roots musician and longtime Toronto Star entertainment critic died in his Hamilton home Sunday afternoon. He was 66.

“Any time we strayed off work topics, it was always about his wife and daughter, and her child, and how much he loved them,” said Star book editor Dianne Rinehart. “He was a big man with a bigger heart.”

Prior to pursuing a journalistic career in Toronto, Quill was a household name in Australia. Throughout the early ‘70s his roots band, Country Radio, released a number of hit singles and albums that resulted in a number of national tours there, where he shared the same stage as Elton John and Creedence Clearwater Revival among others.

“Greg was a first-rank writer, a man with a big heart who and had an encyclopedic knowledge of music,” said acclaimed music critic Larry Leblanc. “When he wrote music he wrote poems. His writing was of extreme high quality that was well thought out and emotional. I’m just heartbroken.”

After the 1974 release of his critically acclaimed solo album, The Outlaw’s Reply, Quill received a travel grant from the Australian Arts Council and moved to Toronto to live here part-time.When he was not working with his newly formed band Southern Cross, Quill was often called upon by the local media to write about music and after a final farewell tour of Australia, became an entertainment reporter at the Star.“He was the consummate critic, a master of the undulating sentence that flowed down the page,” remembers Antonia Zerbisias, who met Quill in 1989 when both were covering television. “He could take the most mundane sitcom and, after he was done with it, even though he hated it, you always felt that he elevated it into something worth noticing.”

Up until the end, Quill was both an artist and a journalist to the core.“Just a couple weeks ago when we were planning a story on Rush, I mentioned the name of the artist who did the band’s album covers. Greg casually commented that the guy had also done an album cover for him back in the day,” recalls Janet Hurley, the Star’s entertainment editor.

“I loved the fact that this man who stood alongside us as a colleague had another history and life as a music superstar and yet in the newsroom he was simply one of us, a journalist.”

His family said on Facebook that Quill died from complications due to pneumonia and recently diagnosed sleep apnea. He is survived by his wife Ellen Davidson, daughter Kaya and a grandson, Raymond as well as by his step-daughters Angela and Tosha and three step-grandchildren, Jack, Owen and Evelyn.