Richard Blade Books in Order

If you want his life story and 80s radio nostalgia: World In My Eyes
If you enjoy thrillers built around history and mystery: SPQR → Ghosts of The Congo → Birthright
If you like 1960s pop culture capers and cons: Imposters
If you want wartime drama with a love story at its core: Slapton Sands
If you are here for deep music interviews and artist stories: The Lockdown Interviews → The Unlocked Interviews

Richard Blade is a British American DJ, television and radio host, and author whose voice became one of the soundtracks of 1980s new wave. Based in Los Angeles, he has spent decades connecting listeners with the bands they love and then turning that life in music into books.

He grew up in the seaside town of Torquay in southwest England, where pop radio, imported records, and late night shows became early obsessions.

By the mid seventies he was touring clubs around Britain and Europe under his birth name, Richard Thomas Sheppard, becoming a familiar face on late night dance floors. A long held dream of living in California finally pulled him across the Atlantic, and he settled in Los Angeles, picking up DJ gigs in clubs and at private parties while he figured out how to break into radio.

His on air break came in 1980 with jobs at stations in Bakersfield, San Luis Obispo, and Long Beach. In 1982 he joined KROQ in Los Angeles, adopting the on air name Richard Blade, a nod to the science fiction film Blade Runner. Within a short time he was one of the station's signature voices, known for championing new wave and alternative bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and Tears for Fears.

Radio led naturally into television. In the early eighties he hosted the daily video music show MV3, which later became Video One, and he created and fronted the weekly series VideoBeat. He went on to host America's Top Ten after Casey Kasem, appear in films and music documentaries, and even write the season finale of the science fiction series Seven Days and the Lifetime movie Long Lost Son, which he also co starred in.

For him, the through line was always simple, use every medium he could to share the music and stories he loved.

After nearly two decades at KROQ he stepped away in 2000, moved to the Caribbean island of St Maarten for a breather, and focused on writing. A few years later he returned to Southern California, consulting on television projects and rejoining radio. Since 2005 he has hosted a daily show on Sirius XM's 1st Wave channel, as well as flashback programs and live DJ sets that keep eighties and early nineties alternative music in rotation for new generations.

Writing gradually moved from side project to second career. His 2017 memoir World In My Eyes traces his journey from English schoolboy to club DJ to Los Angeles radio mainstay, packed with behind the scenes stories about bands, tours, movie sets, and the personal highs and lows that ran alongside them. He followed it with books such as the interview collection The Lockdown Interviews and novels including SPQR, Birthright, Imposters, and Slapton Sands, which turn his love of history, mystery, and pop culture into page turning fiction.

Across those books, certain themes repeat, the pull of music, the way chance meetings can change a life, and the tension between public image and private struggle. Whether he is recreating a Roman expedition, imagining a modern teenager with a dangerous Victorian legacy, or sitting down with a musician he has known for decades, he writes in the same conversational tone listeners know from his shows.

Blade became a United States citizen in the late eighties and married his wife, Krista, in 2000. He continues to live in Southern California, broadcasting, writing, and DJing special events. In 2024 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a small patch of concrete that captures a long career spent putting new music in front of listeners and telling the stories behind it.