Gary Camilleri – Car Audio Aristocracy: 23/08/1974 to 11/03/2025

It is with heavy heart that I write about the passing of an old friend.

I am on the record as saying I have been to more car shows than anyone alive. At least any show that involved car audio as well. A dozen or more each year, adding up through the decades from the early Nineties onwards. As such, I always had the biggest respect for the true lifers. Those who did not come and go after a few years, but kept at it. Those whose passion for car sound was such that it possessed their very soul. The very few for whom it ran as deep as it does for me.

And that includes Gary Camilleri. I first met Gary through my involvement with the Mean Street Cruise. I had carved out a niche as a car show announcer, to the point where my pith helmet was better known at shows than my actual name. Simon Breach, who I had known since meeting at SCUBA diving club as lads, was the promoter and hired me as his compere for Mean Street at Arena Essex.

While the car lunacy and showing off happened on the tattered race oval, the SPL contests, to see who’s car was loudest, were held in the cindered car park out the back. This was a takeover from what had been called the Dry Street Cruise. Originating elsewhere, it had gone legit at the track. They had held a bass contest but when Mean Street took over, the promoter invested in the then quite new Decibel Drag Racing format or dB Drag. This was licensed from Wayne Harris in the USA and meant a standardised set of measuring equipment and methods as to where to place the microphone. The idea was to make these bass contests world-wide comparable for bragging rights. It was a clever idea.

Ken Brierly and Gary Camilleri ran dB Drag Racing UK. Ken was marshall, microphone fitter and competitor wrangling, while Gary was on the booth, starting and recording the measurement runs, while commentating, all at the same time. I would only really get to see him before or after the event. They ran dB Drag for some five years, with them meeting me at shows with the Sound Challenge Association, who grudgingly added the super popular bass contests to their events, as well as others up and down the land at venues such as Santa Pod, Trax and Doncaster, even flying to Sweden one time just to check out DB Drag over there. They did the Bournemouth Burnup shows, too. At one show, they measured one hundred cars. It was a massive scene and they were the daddies of it.

During the Mean Street era, Ken would write the newsletters for the Mean Street Cruise and with Gary, spent pretty much ALL of their free time on the promoting stuff. This was well pre-internet and how it was done. I would arrive stupid early at shows, as I always slept only badly the night before a show and liked driving on the empty morning roads. I made Doncaster in just over one and a half hours from London – well pre camera times yet easier to see the police. That meant I would take a camp stove and bacon to cook breakfast if it was Santa Pod, though. Ken told me that he and Gary would know I had arrived as the torture of bacon cooking aromas assaulted their senses.

So many shows, for so many years…

Gary loved car audio to the point that he literally nagged the owner of Pulse Car Audio in Hadleigh until he gave him a job in 1998. BY 2007 when he left, he had been manager for a long while, too. A side hustle had been dB Productions. Not named for Decibels but rather the derelict bungalow the enterprise was run from! It is “a promotions, marketing, merchandise & branding company offering bespoke solutions across all industries along with our own unique brands” to quote the website which is still up at time of writing. I loved the bands “Almost Famous” and “Absofuckinglutely”.

Gary was an absofuckinglutely lovely bloke who was adored by everyone who knew him.

When he fell ill and he and his loved ones knew it was not a good prognosis, he and his beloved Lee-Ann got married the very next day, Friday 7th March ’25, in his hospital bed, due to the incredible efforts of his care givers at Basildon hospital. The shotgun wedding twenty two years in the making, Ken called it. And they sorted it in 48 hours.

There is so much more that I only know some stuff about, his love for the DJ scene and the ‘Ratpack’ crew. Gary even used to end messages to me with the sign off he loved from my Rayner Rants columns in the trade press. I would say “Take care and avoid the old BOOMPH-TINKLE!”, being the sound of a small car accident. When you would have the bonk impact, followed by the sound of glass tinkling to the deck as the headlamp shattered. That too, is now obsolete, as car headlamps are all plastic.. and go yellow and craze in the sun, rather than last! But he still used it.

All I know is that the world has been robbed way too soon of a complete diamond geezer that I am proud to have been able to call a friend and feel I was never worthy of the bonkers high esteem he held me in. To me, HE is the fucking legend.

I’ll miss you mate. A true LIFER.