A group of veteran North West broadcasters, with combined on-air experience of around 150 years, claim they are owed thousands of pounds from an independent Liverpool radio station.
Billy Butler, Linda McDermott, Roger Lyon and Frankie Connor have all exited Liverpool Live over the last 12 months, and liv over the weekend about their experiences with the challenger channel, which was set up in 2020 as a mooted competitor to BBC Radio Merseyside, and recruited a number of its former DJs, as the BBC itself has been going through a number of changes in its local radio set up recently.
Butler (top right), who has been on the airwaves for over 50 years, told the Echo he was attracted to the fledgling station in 2020 by the opportunity to build a local media operation from the ground up, and said that Liverpool Live MD Rod Keay, seemed to have a “bloody good idea” during their initial conversations: “Radio Merseyside have got it all to themselves. There’s no competition. This one had the plans and the presenters to be able to do that,” he told the paper.
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Butler hosted weekend shows on the station for five years and said that things ran smoothly for most of that time, but began to veer off track over the course of 2025: “There seemed to be no pushing the station and we weren’t doing anything to make sure that the people of Liverpool knew anything about us anymore. It made you lose faith. All of a sudden, our money stopped coming,” the Echo reported. “That was sudden as well because I’d been paid quite regularly for five years. Suddenly, there was no money available for wages and to help the station at all. I put up with it for so long because I owed the station a bit of loyalty.”
The situation led to Butler’s exit last November to join his son’s challenger station In Demand, with around £1,000 still owed after not being paid for five months.
Linda McDermott (left) also spoke to the Echo – she joined the station in October 2024 and said her experience was similar to Butler’s, and that she too had verbally agreed to an informal invoice process that they would be paid on a show-by-show basis.
McDermott, who hosted Under the Duvet Club for BBC Radio Merseyside for 16 years, said that, like Butler, she believed in the station’s vision and appreciated the economic realities surrounding local radio. She told the ECHO: “Things started to go awry when we stopped being paid in about the late spring of 2025.”
McDermott added that she initially stuck by the station out of loyalty and a belief in its vision, but ultimately quit at the end of 2025, owed seven months and “feeling exploited that your own kindness and generosity of spirit was being abused.”
The veteran DJ said she is still owed “thousands” of pounds from her broadcasts on the station, although she had been assured she would receive payment.
McDermott joined the station at a difficult time in her life after the death of her husband, Johnny Kennedy, in 2024 and said she was still in “the depths of grief”. She added: “Being back on radio was the furthest thing I could think to cope with.”
The latest two BBC vets to leave Liverpool live were Frankie Connor (bottom right) and Roger Lyon, who both called it a day in April of this year. Lyon joined the station in 2024 and told the Echo the final straw came when Connor was unable to access the Liverpool Live studio, on Norfolk Street in the Baltic Triangle, due to an apparent broken lock: “That turned out to be our final weekend. We haven’t done a programme since.”
Lyon claimed that the city centre studio is no longer in use, although the station continues to broadcast as of this morning, which led him to quit Liverpool Live as he had no interest in broadcasting from home.
He told the Echo: “Frankie and I said, ‘That’s not what we signed up to do.’ We haven’t got the facilities at home to do it, nor have we got the inclination. So I said we’re not carrying on. What we would like is for you to pay us what you owe us and then we’ll say thank you very much. Since then I’ve heard nothing from him.”
He added: “The downside for me was that it was such a massive missed opportunity. That was the tragedy for me.”
Prolific North has approached Liverpool Live for comment.
