A RENOWNED writer has been fondly remembered for his revolutionary analysis of rock music.

Dave Laing, a former Sussex University student, wrote for British music magazine Cream where long, in-depth interviews with leading musicians and singers of the day, particularly in the Seventies, became the perfect contrast to mainstream pop magazines aimed at a teenage market.

The publishers of Cream had been inspired by legendary American counter-culture magazine Rolling Stone. Dave’s work also appeared in Let It Rock – he became the first editor. His comprehensive knowledge of music led him to co-author an Encyclopedia of Rock which had several editions, and it became the Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music.

Dave graduated with a English and sociology degree from the University of Sussex in 1972.

He was born on January 9, 1947, in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. His father, William Laing, was a psychiatric nurse.

In 1965 Dave won a scholarship to King’s College in London but left two years later. He took on clerical jobs and started writing about music. In 1969 he wrote The Sound of Our Time, which analyses British and American pop music. Dave also wrote about folk music for the weekly magazine Sounds, and The Electric Muse. In 1985, he wrote One Chord Wonders: Power And Meaning In Punk, which was his first book-length study of the genre. His marriage to Gilly Harry ended in divorce, and in 1986 he married Sally Quinn who survives him.

His in-depth knowledge of music and his interest in the record business had led him to a job as a press officer for International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Music Week and Music Business International.

Dave also carried out numerous interviews with record-business figures for the British Library Oral History Project.

As well as writing, Dave was a music lecturer at the Open University and Trinity and All Saints College. From the Nineties onwards, he was a research fellow, lecturer and examiner at the universities of Westminster and Liverpool. He was a board member of the Popular Music journal, and the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and launched the journal Popular Music History.

He died on January 7.