Do you ever find yourself shouting at books, just as other people shout at the television? At stupidity, omissions, plain bad writing? I had several screaming fits during former Radio 1 DJ Andy Kershaw’s extraordinary autobiography, but none more so than right at the end, when he crams his brain-melting nervous breakdown — surely the main reason for writing the book in the first place — into two tiny final chapters.
In 2008, the one-time darling of Radio 1 — a fresh-faced Leeds student who shared an office with John Peel and carved a successful career at the BBC for most of the 1980s and 1990s — experienced a sudden, frightening, possibly psychotic reversal of fortune. He found himself on the run in Ludlow, Shropshire, “the subject of a manhunt” after a warrant for his arrest had been issued in the Isle of Man. He had violated a restraining order taken out by his ex-girlfriend Juliette. He was a wanted man, and all over the papers.
Barely two years earlier, he had been looking forward to a new life. He had moved to the Isle of Man with his girlfriend of 17 years and their two children, Dolly and Sonny, now 12 and 13. But even as they were unpacking the car, Juliette discovered a text message on his phone about a one-night stand. At first, he thought she might forgive him — she later claimed in court that this was one of many flings — but she decided to leave. She moved the children out and found a new boyfriend. In a matter of months, he lost his dream, his family, everything.
He took the split badly. Distressed at being separated from his children, he started to drink heavily. He frightened Juliette when he saw her in the street, sent abusive texts. She eventually took out a restraining order, which he ignored. He was arrested several times; he was sent to jail on three separate occasions. Once, in 2008, he was detained for 42 days.
Even after prison — apart from one vermin-filled cell, he describes the experience as “not too bad” — he continued to flout the order. He decided to leave the Isle of Man, but still tried to contact his children. When a warrant for his arrest was issued, he went on the run. Eventually, he wound up in Ludlow, “exhausted, hungry, anxious, hungover, lonely and missing my children”, he writes. “I had nowhere left to go.”
Advertisement
He spent nine months at large in Britain, finally returning to the Isle of Man when he heard that Juliette was thinking of moving to Scotland. He was handed a suspended sentence and sent to a psychologist. Privately, he was destitute, living off fish and collecting driftwood for fuel, at one point unable to afford the bus fare for a court appearance 10 miles away. But he was determined to get sober and fight his case. He was hired again as a presenter for Radio 3, and started seeing his children. He has now recovered and lives with Sonny full time.
From the raw, fluid way he writes, the madness and frustration are still clearly fresh in his mind. There are some truly heart-wrenching moments: a tragic scene in the offices of a charity organisation where he is allowed one hour of supervised time with Dolly, or the moment when he returns to the Isle of Man and spots Sonny on the street.
“He looked astonished and frightened,” he writes. “ ‘Sonny! Sonny! It’s me, Daddy,’ I said, and hugged him. ‘Come in!’ But he wouldn’t cross the threshold and melted quickly into the youth club with his friends. There, I learnt, he called his mother — understandably — to break the news of my return.”
In many ways, his two final chapters are an entirely separate book, a kind of Kramer vs Kramer but with added bumbags and John Player Specials. The way he turns his life around at the end is virtually a film montage. Why he didn’t use the episode to drive the entire book is a total mystery. Why he chose a description of Live Aid, his first significant presenting job after he joined the BBC — an event he describes later as “boring and predictable” — as the prologue is also baffling.
Part of the problem is surely the sheer volume of material Kershaw has to cover. After 30 years in rock, he has had plenty of other jaw-dropping experiences. The rest of the problem is an insistence on playing the tune he wants to, rather than the tune people want to hear. He is quirky, dogmatic, outspoken, abrasive: much happier writing about motorbikes and the Clash than tears and poverty. At Radio 1 in the 1980s, he was always this way, gauche and slightly Asperger’s, the DJ who insisted on playing world music. He was forever travelling to unusual countries in search of new talent: Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Rwanda. He had little time for the pretensions of mainstream acts: U2 is “a big bag of wind”, he fumes, Bob Geldof “a cut-price Mick Jagger”. One of his best chapters in the book is about the absurd excesses of the Rolling Stones. In 1982, he was asked to oversee their huge concert at Roundhay. On arrival, they demanded a Japanese water garden, complete with “a stream, a bridge, a waterfall, a pond and koi carp”. Kershaw somehow arranges the whole thing, complete with babbling brook and parasols “with the hand-painted greeting, in Japanese: ‘F*** you, Rolling Stones’”.
Advertisement
By the 1990s, he was focused almost entirely on African music and travel, visiting 97 of the world’s 193 countries, as “shithole correspondent”, he says, for Channel 4’s Travelog. He had lunch with Hezbollah in Lebanon, drank with militia in Albania “where we were forced to attend three wedding receptions in one afternoon, one of them at gunpoint”. In South Africa, he even met Nelson Mandela. “You spend 27 years in prison, they let you out and they give you a Simple Minds concert?” he said.
By far the best excursion, however, is a trip to North Korea with Christopher Hitchens. After the obligatory pilgrimage to Kim Jong Il’s 90ft statue in Pyongyang, Boozehound One and Boozehound Two visit the zoo (Hitchens recalls a parrot, sadly no longer in evidence, that was trained to say “Long live the Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung” in English) and an eerie university with a “Question and Answer Room” containing a single, blinking egghead. As evening draws near, Hitchens bellows to the tour guide, “May we eat dog this evening?” They are whisked to Pyongyang’s top dog restaurant for dog stew. Whereupon Kershaw throws the anecdote away entirely, saying they ate “dog stew, after which we were steered into, of all things, a karaoke club”. Hitchens spends the rest of the night “plummily warbling La Bamba”, so we will never know what he made of the meal.
There are other missed opportunities, too: a three-week fling with Carol Vorderman is given less than a paragraph; a woman “twisting vigorously, and alone, right next to me for half an hour” at the Capital Jazz Festival in 1979 — Princess Margaret — gets barely a sentence. In most cases, he redeems himself with humour: a picture of the Saddleworth parking lot — now marked as disabled — where he lost his virginity, or as he puts it, “fell into the threshing machine that was Joanna Coop”, is a complete highlight, something I laughed at, rather than screamed. If only the rest of the book matched up.