Around the same time he was invited to join the team about to launch
Let It Rock magazine by
Charlie Gillett, and America's
Creem magazine. His association with the band led not only to 1976's
Rod Stewart and the Changing Faces, a book which
Paul Gorman has suggested "broke the mould in terms of music books in the 70s," but to a songwriting partnership with keyboard player
Ian McLagan. A Backpages Classics Kindle edition of
Rod Stewart and the Changing Faces was published in 2011. In 1973 he took over as editor of
Let It Rock, while continuing to write for
NME and script documentaries for Radio 1. He wrote a "savagely readable" novelisation of
Slade in Flame, which paid scant attention to the screenplay and was withdrawn from sale at cinemas where the film was shown in 1975 for its bad language and explicit violence.
Slade's
Noddy Holder nevertheless called it "a great book", suggesting John "must have been around the scene for quite a while, he knows a hell of a lot." Then, drawing on his teenage experiences of the British R&B scene for early material, John became the first biographer of
Eric Clapton. An occasional contributor to
Time Out, for whom he interviewed his football hero
Stan Bowles, Pidgeon followed editor
Richard Williams to
Melody Maker, where he championed
The Police, accompanying the trio on their first US tour, as he did almost 30 years later during their reunion. By the end of the decade, Pidgeon was back in radio, making documentaries and special programmes for
Capital Radio, whose Head of Music was
The Story of Pop's producer Tim Blackmore. Pidgeon devised two long-running series –
Jukebox Saturday Night and
The View From The Top – for disc jockey
Roger Scott, and when Scott moved to Radio 1 in 1988, he devised
Classic Albums, which he and Scott produced as the network's first independent production. After Scott died of cancer in October 1989,
Richard Skinner took over as presenter, and more than fifty programmes were aired around the world. ==Radio comedy==