Career
He started broadcasting on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio Merseyside in the early 1970s. His first series, Number Holds Bard was based around the Mersey poets. His music programme On the Beat has been running on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio Merseyside since 1985 and is currently broadcast between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm on Sundays.
Over the years, Leigh has interviewed thousands of musicians on the show.
His first book was Paul Simon - Now and Then, published in 1973, the first biography of the American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Since then, he has written, or collaborated on, over two dozen books
Many of his books relate to The Beatles or Merseybeat and he has interviewed more people connected to the Liverpool 1960s scene than anybody else. There have been several one-off series on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio Merseyside, the best known being "Let"s Go Down the Cavern" in 1981.
Leigh has written the sleeve notes or Civil Defense booklets for over 200 albums.
He writes obituaries of musicians for The Independent, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and he also writes for Record Collector, Country Music People and Now Dig This. His acclaimed history of British popular before the Beatles, Halfway To Paradise (1996), has been expanded and issued in two volumes as British People’s Before The Beatles, available only on Kindle. He has been working for two years on Frank Sinatra - An Extraordinary Life, which will be published in October 2015 by McNidder and Grace for Sinatra"s centenary.