Dick Witts

Who is Dick Witts?

Richard "Dick" Witts is a professional musicologist, music historian, and ex leader of 1980s band The Passage. He was born in Cleethorpes on the coast of Lincolnshire, England.

He studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music and briefly at Manchester University. During this time he was a member of the Hallé Orchestra as a percussionist. During the mid-1970s he wrote for the contemporary classical music magazine Contact.

At that time, he was also involved in starting a Manchester Musicians Collective. This led into contact with the growing punk scene and he formed The Passage, producing their recordings and singing on many of their releases.

He presented television programme Oxford Road Show in the early 1980s for the BBC from Oxford Road Studios, Manchester and was also a reporter for BBC Radio 3.

Thirty of his radio interviews and contributions are housed in the British Library Sound Archive. In 2003 he gave the Saul Seminar there on the history of music presentation in radio.

During the late 1980s he became involved in arts administration roles. He subsequently wrote a critical history of the Arts Council of Great Britain: Artist Unknown: An Alternative History Of The Arts Council.