Leo Sayer

• Genre: Lite Rock
• Hometown: Shoreham-by-Sea
• Leo Sayer Website

About

Although he had a handful of hits in the U.K. before 1977, it was that year's Grammy-winning single "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" and the lite-rock benchmark "When I Need You" that made Leo Sayer a household name in the U.S. A British-born singer-songwriter, Sayer initially performed his songs dressed as a mime. With his astonishing Afro and near dog-whistle falsetto, he represents a spike in '70s soft-rock wimpiness, somewhere between Elton John and fitness messiah Richard Simmons. Nevertheless, Sayer has remained busy recording albums and contributing to film soundtracks, and he even managed to crack the U.K. charts with a No. 1 showing for "Thunder in My Heart" as recently as 2006. In 2008, he released Don't Wait Until Tomorrow, an acoustic/smooth jazz reworking of material spanning the breadth of his long career.

- Mike McGuirk