McCartney Times

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.

For the sixtieth anniversary of the Beatles’ first Parlophone single, “Love Me Do”, he and Mike Jones wrote The Road to Love Me Do, which was published in September 2022. It tells the story of Merseybeat through the Liverpool artists who came before the Beatles, and details numerous private recordings made by local bands prior to October 1962.

For his latest book – a memoir, 80@80, Spencer has raided the archives and diaries to create 80 chapters that reflect a life dedicated to writing and talking about pop music.

The anecdotes and stories in 80@80, from decades spent on BBC Radio Merseyside and column writing for the Liverpool Echo, feature hundreds of household names he has interviewed – ranging from local legend Ken Dodd to movie stars like Billy Bob Thornton. But it is the tales of the Beatles and the fascinating singers, songwriters, and the rest of music’s movers and shakers, that dominate his action-packed biography.

His friend Colin Hall, former custodian of John Lennon’s childhood home, says: “Spencer is a Lancastrian treasure trove of words and insights and has been on the radio for over 50 years. He’s a walking encyclopaedia of the development of pop and rock music culture in the UK and USA.”

And his career is remembered fondly by fellow BBC broadcaster Bob Harris: “I think it began with a series on the Liverpool poets and then he did that series, Let’s Go Down the Cavern, which was put out as a book too. That was the first history of Merseybeat.”

Whether he’s talking to Willie Nelson or Wee Willie Harris, Spencer Leigh has an unerring ability to recall the small fascinating details of the conversations he has been privileged to have with decades of artists who have shaped popular music history.

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