Welcome to the site for Les Gillon.

Les Gillon is a musician, writer and academic.  He’s worked as a guitarist, bassist, vocalist, composer and songwriter since the 1970s  and has taught performance and composition to young musicians for over twenty years.  He records and performs regularly in a variety of ensembles, playing types of music that range from experimental improvisation to traditional British folk music. This site features his longstanding projects Fez,  Fire Tower 4 and Ghost School, as well as his newest project Les Gillon and The Agents Of Karma.

In his role at the University of Central Lancashire, he is Associate Director of the Creative Practice Research Academy and, together with Professor Ewa Mazierska and Music Industry Consultant Tony Rigg, he is Co-Director of the Music Research Group, which has published a series of edited collections on the future of the music industry and organised conferences featuring international panels of academics and industry professionals.

In addition to his research in the field of music, he also writes on aesthetics and the visual arts.  His recent monograph The Uses of Reason in the Evaluation of Artworks: Commentaries on the Turner Prize (Palgrave, 2017) uses the Turner Prize as a case study, in order to explore fundamental questions about the nature, purpose and value of art. He is also active in practice-based music research that explores composition and improvisation techniques, the use of non-western music traditions and interdisciplinary collaborations with dance, moving image and spoken word practitioners. 

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