Music business veteran Roger St. Pierre worked on the last ever Bill Haley tour and the Jackson 5’s first visit to the UK. As PR and promotion man for James Brown, BB King, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Wilson Pickett, the Drifters, Jerry Lee Lewis, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Slade, Glen Campbell, George and Gwen McCrae, KC & The Sunshine Band, Junior Walker, and many others, he had the inside track on the record industry through the 'Sixties and 'Seventies.

His Funk Funktion operation worked on six number-ones, including M’s ‘Pop Music’, Althea & Donna’s ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ and JJ Barry’s ‘No Charge’ – which he happily admits was one of the worse records ever made. The company also held the UK promotion contracts for such seminal labels as Ember, TK, reggae’s Studio One outfit and disco hit factory Solar.

Roger additionally ran his own Now! And Energy labels, with releases by such artists as the O’Jays, David Soul and The Valentine Brothers (with the original of ‘Money’s Too Tight To Mention’). And, in 1969, he was co-promoter of the historic ‘Peace For Christmas’ concert, which headlined John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band – and outfit which included that night Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, George Harrison, Billy Preston, Alan White of Yes, Delaney & Bonnie, the Manfred Mann Band’s Klaus Voorman and, of course, Yoko.

But above all else Roger has been a prolific editor and writer. His first of many articles for Blues & Soul appeared in issue six, back in 1967. For many years, he was a prolific contributor to the pages of New Musical Express and, under his Peter Kent pen-name, Record Mirror and Sounds. He was launch editor of both Disco Mirror and Disco International & Club News and over his 40 year music industry career he has written well over 1,000 sleevenotes – ranging from T Bone Walker, Brook Benton and Stan Getz to Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Delius, from Freddie & The Dreamers to Dinah Washington.

Roger was the main writer of the NME Book of Rock and the subsequent Rock Handbook – the biggest selling rock music encyclopaedia of all time. He also co-wrote the best-selling The Encyclopaedia of Black Music and penned books on such artists as Jimi Hendrix, Bon Jovi, Ike & Tina Turner, Ah-Ha, Bob Marley and Madonna.

As a broadcaster, Roger worked on pirate radio and subsequently Solar Radio, currently hosting a weekly two-hour ‘Rhythm & Blues Revival Show’ that is broadcast across Europe on Sky Digital and around the world via the internet. He wrote the narration for Horace Ove’s award-winning TV and cinema documentary Reggae and in recent times has completed several series of six half-hour documentaries for BBC Radio Two – on Atlantic Records’ soul heritage, the life stories of Count Basie and Chuck Berry and the saga of blues giant Robert Johnson – for which projects he carried out all the field research, conducted the interviews and co-wrote the scripts.