“Any
time we strayed off work topics, it was always about his wife and
daughter, and her child, and how much he loved them,” said Star book editor Dianne Rinehart. “He was a big man with a bigger heart.”
Prior to pursuing a
journalistic career in Toronto, Quill was a household name in Australia.
Throughout the early ‘70s his roots band, Country Radio, released a
number of hit singles and albums that resulted in a number of national
tours there, where he shared the same stage as Elton John and Creedence
Clearwater Revival among others.
“Greg was a first-rank
writer, a man with a big heart who and had an encyclopedic knowledge of
music,” said acclaimed music critic Larry Leblanc. “When he wrote music
he wrote poems. His writing was of extreme high quality that was well
thought out and emotional. I’m just heartbroken.”
After the 1974 release of his critically acclaimed solo album, The Outlaw’s Reply, Quill received a travel grant from the Australian Arts Council and moved to Toronto to live here part-time.When he was not
working with his newly formed band Southern Cross, Quill was often
called upon by the local media to write about music and after a final
farewell tour of Australia, became an entertainment reporter at the
Star.“He was the consummate
critic, a master of the undulating sentence that flowed down the page,”
remembers Antonia Zerbisias, who met Quill in 1989 when both were
covering television. “He could take the most mundane sitcom and, after
he was done with it, even though he hated it, you always felt that he
elevated it into something worth noticing.”
Up until the end, Quill was both an artist and a journalist to the core.“Just a couple weeks
ago when we were planning a story on Rush, I mentioned the name of the
artist who did the band’s album covers. Greg casually commented that the
guy had also done an album cover for him back in the day,” recalls
Janet Hurley, the Star’s entertainment editor.
“I loved the fact that
this man who stood alongside us as a colleague had another history and
life as a music superstar and yet in the newsroom he was simply one of
us, a journalist.”
His family said on
Facebook that Quill died from complications due to pneumonia and
recently diagnosed sleep apnea. He is survived by his wife Ellen
Davidson, daughter Kaya and a grandson, Raymond as well as by his
step-daughters Angela and Tosha and three step-grandchildren, Jack, Owen
and Evelyn.
