John Platt

John Arthur Platt, librarian, writer, broadcaster and collector: born Heston, Middlesex 26 July 1952; twice married; died New York 7 May 2001.

John Arthur Platt, librarian, writer, broadcaster and collector: born Heston, Middlesex 26 July 1952; twice married; died New York 7 May 2001.

From the drear west London suburb of Heston, the psychedelic dreams of West Coast USA looked like a promised land to a 1960s schoolboy. John Platt grew up to be a librarian; but, by the end of his life, he had escaped the confines of the Richmond-upon-Thames depository for Bohemian Greenwich Village. In the process he had become Britain's pre-eminent expert in 1960s psychedelia, and the social history of the period he loved. Jon Savage, author of the 1992 book England's Dreaming, comments that Platt "deserves recognition as a psychedelic historian of some note ­ a very early historian of the classic hippie period '65-'71".

Platt had an early baptism in that culture. He was born to working-class parents in Heston in 1952 ­ his father worked for Technicolor on the Bath Road ­ but a hint of his future fascination with pop culture came from the fact that his grandfather had been general manager at Pinewood Studios.

At nine he attended Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith: according to his friends and family, it was this that opened up possibilities for Platt, introducing him to people "from different backgrounds". By his early teens he was frequenting London clubs, seeing legendary Sixties bands at places such as the Marquee, Eel Pie Island and the Hyde Park concerts ­ assisted by his tall stature (he was 6ft 4in) which made him look older than he was. In later life, interviewing Eric Clapton for VH1's Legends series, he amazed the guitarist ­ and turned a run-of-the-mill media encounter into a sort of reunion ­ by telling Clapton, "I was there." As his friend Roy Kelly remarks, "And he was."

It was Platt's experience of Sixties pop ­ "when pop became pop", as Kelly says: "and before Art with a capital A got in the way", remarked Platt ­ that would provide the means to leave the library service (which he joined in 1970) to become a fulltime researcher, writer, broadcaster and collector. A keen fan of ZigZag magazine in 1970-74 ­ "when it was still OK to think about and like those West Coast bands" ­ he fixated on groups such as Love, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead and, his particular favourites, the Charlatans, and started his own magazine, Comstuck Lode. He became friends with ZigZag's indefatigable rock historian, Pete Frame, creator of the "Rock Family Tree" ­ and would later work with Frame on the BBC2 series based on his pop cultural genealogy.

Having published a memoir of the Yardbirds, Platt worked on a television history of rock in Britain, which was unfortunately shelved when its narrator ­ and his great friend ­ Alexis Korner died. In 1985 Fourth Estate published his Rock Routes of London, according to The Times a "well-researched" and "beautifully written" atlas of rock's metropolitan networks, the venues and places associated with bands such as the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, and David Bowie. For Platt, it was "a labour of love". He co-authored The Hendrix Experience (1990) with Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix's drummer; and in 1993, for Simon & Schuster's Classic Rock Albums, wrote on Cream's "Disraeli Gears".

By now the call of America had become strident. In 1992, at the Florence Film Festival, he met Amalie Rothschild, who wanted Platt to put text to her photographs of the legendary Fillmore Ballroom; it was through Rothschild that he met MaryLou Capes ­ who had worked at Fillmore ­ and with whom he fell in love, and subsequently married (having separated from his first wife in the 1970s). "New York was his spiritual home," recalls his sister, Mary Simpson.

Here Platt hung out with rock guitarists and pursued his collection of Sixties psychedelic posters, probably one of the most important such collections in the world. He also curated the Cinerock Festival at the Lincoln Center (having organised a similar season at the BFI in London), and at the time of his death was working on a film encyclopaedia, and a history of English blues and R&B. He died at home, of cancer, and his life was celebrated in a two-day "non-sectarian shiva/wake" in New York City.

Philip Hoare