After leaving school in London, he worked briefly in a stockbrokers' office before securing his first job in the music business in 1964, as a salesman at the HMV record store on Oxford Street.
[1][2] In the mid and late 1970s White interviewed many of the black musicians touring in Britain and developed friendships with some of them, including James Brown, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson.
He wrote extensively on black music, interviewing such stars as Michael Jackson, Barry White and Marvin Gaye, and also occasionally reviewed a wider range of records in the NME and other magazines including Smash Hits.
He left in 1990 to start writing a biography of James Brown, which was never completed, and for several years worked on discographical research for the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS).
[1][2] White lived in Ilford, and died there in 2018, aged 72, from a cardiac arrest while in hospital undergoing tests for cancer.