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TeaFlix Interview with Spencer Leigh

Spencer Leigh is a BBC Radio presenter and author, with particular expertise in the development of pop and rock music and culture in Britain.

Career

Leigh started broadcasting on BBC Radio Merseyside in the early 1970s. His first series, No Holds Bard, was based around the Mersey poets. His music programme On the Beat ran continuously from 1985 to 2020 on BBC Radio Merseyside. Over the years, Leigh interviewed thousands of musicians on the show. The entire collection of 2,027 programmes has been given to Liverpool's Central Library, and there is an on-going project to archive them. Some one-off series have been given to the British Library.

His first book was Paul Simon - Now and Then, published in 1973, which was the first biography of the American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Since then, Leigh has written, or collaborated on, over two dozen books. Many of his books relate to The Beatles or Merseybeat, and he has interviewed many people connected to the Liverpool 1960s scene. There have been several one-off series on BBC Radio Merseyside, the best known being Let's Go Down the Cavern (1981), which was also broadcast on local BBC stations throughout the UK.

Leigh has written the sleeve notes or CD booklets for over 300 albums. He writes obituaries of musicians for The Guardian, The Independent, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; he has also written extensively for Record Collector, Country Music People and Now Dig This. He has a weekly 'My City' column every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo.

His history of British pop before the Beatles, Halfway To Paradise (1996), has been expanded and issued in two volumes as British Pop Before The Beatles, available only on Kindle. He has written a series of musical biographies for McNidder & Grace: Frank Sinatra (updated with 50 pages of lists in 2022), Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Simon & Garfunkel.

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