The lost years of Andy Kershaw

Kershaw is striding along the seafront in Peel, his home town. He is 51. He wears hiking boots, ripped jeans and a check shirt. He is smoking. He is always smoking. He’s telling me about one of the things he loves, the TT races, in which motorcyclists belt around the Isle of Man at suicidal speeds. This year, seven people died. “You’d have to have no soul,” he says, “not to be utterly staggered by the sight of these bikes going down a hill at 180mph.”

When we arranged the interview, he told me he wasn’t one for sitting down and talking. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “Do you have walking boots?” I said I’d bring a pair. “Don’t bring them,” said Kershaw, “wear them.” His tone of voice made it seem like doing anything else would be absolutely mental. This, I realise, is his gift as a radio presenter. He talks with withering conviction. Some people like it. Some don’t. For 25 years, he’s made programmes about music, particularly obscure music, from all over the world. He also likes to report from troubled zones – places that have lost control, with people ranting and shooting each other. In person, he is forthright, bordering on dictatorial. But as the day goes on, I like him more and more.

I want to sit him down and say: what happened, Andy? So we go into a restaurant. We are the only diners. Peel is dead quiet. It might be the Fifties. Kershaw, who never stops talking, is telling me about a man making a model boat. It’s a funny story. We laugh. We order drinks. A beer for me. A diet Coke for the teetotal Kershaw. So: what happened, Andy?

For the first time, he is guarded. The story goes that he moved to Peel, with his partner of 17 years, Juliette, and their two children, in the summer of 2006. On the day, Kershaw took the removal men, and everybody else, to the pub. Juliette left with the children, to go to the new house. Her mobile phone was down, so she borrowed Kershaw’s. She had the phone in her possession for ten minutes. When Kershaw arrived at the house, his family was gone. His phone was on the kitchen table. It displayed a text message from a woman he’d had a fling with.

“She’s only ten minutes ahead of me,” says Kershaw. “So it’s quite clear to me that what she’s done is gone back home and started to go through my old messages. I wasn’t hiding anything, you’ve got to understand. If I’d been trying to hide something…”

We are interrupted by the waiter. Also, two people sit at the table next to us. “You go ahead, William, eat properly, because you haven’t done yet,” says Kershaw. He likes to control things. We order. Kershaw suddenly decides he wants a cigarette. “Let’s go outside,” he says. He beetles round to the back door of the restaurant, opens it, and beckons me outside. “There’s a whole empty restaurant,” he says, “and those people have to sit right on top of us. I’m not saying they’re eavesdroppers. But it’s not for their consumption.”

Outside, Kershaw sucks on his cigarette. Did his partner know about the fling? “No. It was of no significance. I wasn’t having an ongoing affair. I’d had a one-night stand, a year earlier, at WOMAD. I wasn’t having an affair and, in fact, I’d been the one who was eager to move away from London, from my old London ways, from my old London lifestyle. If I had been trying to conceal an affair from Juliette, I’d have been very scrupulous with my old text messages. I wasn’t. I was careless because there was nothing really to care about. I mean, you know, I didn’t want to upset Juliette, but it wasn’t that I was actively hiding something.”

He pauses. Again, the withering conviction. “It was something that I, even, had forgotten about. Otherwise I wouldn’t have handed over my mobile so readily, would I?”

What happened next, as Kershaw sees it, is that he entered some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare. Juliette moved out. She got a new boyfriend. She wrote Kershaw a letter, saying she was never coming back. Kershaw sank into depression. He received a solicitor’s letter about access to his children. He threw it in the bin. He kept calling Juliette. The police knocked on his door, warning him not to. Juliette applied for a restraining order barring Kershaw from having any contact with her. The order was granted. Kershaw contacted her. Again and again. The police knocked on his door again. They cautioned him. He’d broken the restraining order. Once more and he’d be in real trouble.

At this point, Kershaw began to drink more heavily. He’d quit for a while in 2006. But now things were different. “Unfortunately,” he says, “there is nothing that the doctors, or the chemist, could prescribe you that alleviates or dispels anxiety as quickly, as efficiently, and as fully, as having a drink does. Because when one of them hits you, and you’re in that state of mind, you just sag, and you think: ‘Oh, what the hell.’ But then, beyond that stage lies poor judgment. And you start to do things like I did. The restraining order should never have been brought in in the first place, but I dare say I wouldn’t have broken it as often as I did if I’d not had a few beers or a few glasses of wine before I picked up the phone.”

He takes another drag of another fag. “None of these alcohol experts will ever say that the problem we’ve got here is that it works – in the short term. It doesn’t work in the medium or long term.”

But Kershaw’s nightmare moved into the medium term. “The point at which it became very, very nasty,” he says, “and the point at which my contact with the children was denied by her, was when the new boyfriend came on the scene. And it was all done with the connivance of the Isle of Man police and judiciary. It was completely unnecessary. It was entirely none of their business, because no one was being harmed. I’ve no track record of violence. I’ve no track record of lawbreaking. All I did was say, from time to time, ‘Excuse me, I’d like to see my children.’ ”

He is jabbing his finger towards me. Sometimes he wipes his eyes. One of the things that outrages him is the fact that Juliette’s boyfriend was, at the time of the restraining order, married to someone else. They were having “what was, inarguably, an adulterous affair… while the court was telling me… On one occasion, the High Bailiff said to me, ‘The root of all your troubles, Mr Kershaw, is you can’t keep it in your trousers.’ And meanwhile, they’ve granted a restraining order to a couple conducting an adulterous affair in the next street. And I was supposed to take all this with serenity and equanimity. Well, I didn’t. And d’you know what? I’m proud I didn’t. And I’ll tell you something else – my kids are proud that I didn’t as well. It was outrageous. It was outrageous!”

He wipes his eyes again. He went to jail three times. The longest sentence was 90 days, of which he served 42. He says he didn’t keep a prison diary, because prison was desperately dull. He just sat around and read books. Terry Waite wrote to him. When he got out, a woman he’d never met called Catherine had sent a letter to his house. He started an affair with Catherine.

To get away from the tabloid press, who had begun to harass him, he left the Isle of Man. Back in England, he broke the restraining order again. Now he was a wanted man. He hit the bottle. He drifted around England, sleeping on sofas. He was running short of money. He flew back to the Isle of Man. Once more, he was arrested and spent a night in jail. But at a hearing the next day, he was given a suspended sentence. That was the start of what Kershaw sees as his comeback.

We leave the restaurant and walk along the seafront to Kershaw’s house. He walks with great strides. He is, I think, hyperactive, or close to it. He tells me about another great disappointment. Having recovered from his breakdown, he recorded a Radio 4 programme, On the Ropes, with John Humphrys, which was suddenly shelved. Kershaw believes this was because Juliette had called the BBC, asking for it to be dropped.

“It was massively damaging to me. I’d got myself back in similar physical shape to what you see now. Back in 28in-waist jeans. I was in fantastic physical and mental shape, after all I’d been through. I’d had John Humphrys the week before slap me on the shoulder with the words, ‘I think you’ve got the tone of that just right.’ I thought: everyone will hear how positive I am.” But Mark Damazer, then Controller of Radio 4, pulled the programme. “I sat there and thought, ‘Oh my God. All the work I’ve just done. The strength it’s taken to get back here. It’s all just been undone in a trice because this bloke has no backbone.’ ”

He says: “It was letting people know: he’s not only back on form, he’s on the best form of his bloody life. And the signal that was sent out instead was that I must have gone in that studio and been so full of anger, and been out of control, and made a programme they couldn’t broadcast.” (I contacted Humphrys’ BBC office, but nobody would comment. I spoke to Mark Damazer, who has since moved on from the BBC; Damazer said the programme would have been dropped whether or not Juliette had tried to stop it, not because of Kershaw’s performance – he was very clear about that – but because the programme “presented legal and editorial policy difficulties to do with minors”.)

We go into Kershaw’s house. It is a large, imposing, double-fronted Victorian edifice, right on the seafront. The views are superb – bay, hills, ruined castle. On a clear day you can see Scotland. Inside, it’s like a student house most students could only dream of – posters of the Clash and Bruce Springsteen, big sunny rooms, homely clutter everywhere. Upstairs, he has a dressing room with what looks like 100 check shirts hanging on rails. He’s worn the same outfit, more or less, since he was a student. He lives with his dog, a schnauzer called Buster.

I ask him to sum up his life. He thinks for a while. “Too fast to live, too nosey to die,” he says. He was brought up in Rochdale, the son of teachers. A Catholic, he attended strict schools. He loved reading. As a child, he was small and shy. He did well academically, and got into the University of Leeds to read politics. His sister, Liz, now also a BBC radio presenter, went there, too. Kershaw loved pop music; his parents, he says, couldn’t see the point of it.

At university, he became Ents Secretary – the person who books the bands, which, at Leeds, is a big deal. The Stones, The Who and the Clash have all played at Leeds. Kershaw’s academic life died a death; but he says one of his proudest moments was receiving an honorary doctorate from Leeds in 2006.

After university, Kershaw worked with the singer Billy Bragg for a while; he was a furiously active participant in the music scene. Until he was 20, he’d been shy around girls. “No confidence with girls until one in particular sorted me out. Then I had the confidence and, shall we say, made up for lost time.” He got into music TV and radio. He presented The Old Grey Whistle Test; the producers figured that he understood punk, but hadn’t stopped liking all the old stuff. He still reveres Dylan and Springsteen. Then he started making programmes about obscure music from far-flung parts. Then came the war zones, the crazy places.

He talks lovingly, and also rather bracingly, about his old friends, the late Johns Walters and Peel, in the way one might speak of, say, Roman emperors. Peel, he says, “was anything but a rebel”, and somehow managed to change his accent twice without anybody minding. “How it could have gone unremarked that here was a man who, very publicly, on the radio, changed his voice at least twice, overnight. If I went on Radio 3 next week and started speaking with a French accent, I think people would remark on it.” We talk for a while about Walters and Peel, with Kershaw doing the voices. We talk about Dave Lee Travis. Kershaw looks like anything but a Radio 1 DJ – wiry and weathered, he looks more like a lumberjack or the sort of guy who mends boats. He actually owns a boat – but not a yacht, as some tabloids claimed. He uses it for fishing.

I’m enjoying his company. During the afternoon, he darts around, saying hello to everybody. He says he’ll play me an unreleased version of Love in Vain, by the Rolling Stones. He talks about Tony Blair, about war, about world politics. He keeps saying how tough he is. He keeps smoking.

“I love it,” he says. “I’d recommend smoking to everybody. In the age of piety and sanctimony in which we live, it’s an act of political defiance and subversion to be a smoker.” He smokes between 40 and 50 cigarettes a day.

He’s not bitter. He says he’s raring to make more radio programmes. “There’s one thing that still gets me going: being in some absolute madhouse, having to organise your thoughts.”

In fact, he thinks he’s had a lucky life. “I’m not full of regrets about anything,” he says. “We live in a culture now where if the slightest thing goes wrong, counsellors rush in. No, no, no – those of us who live in the real world call it life. And what happened to me was an aspect of life. I managed to cope with it. And I managed to emerge from it even stronger and better than before. So I’m not bitter about it. My relationship with the children is probably stronger and closer now than it was before. For all those people, for all their efforts to crush me, they failed. I turned out to be a lot tougher, and a more formidable opponent, than they expected me to be.” Once more, he wipes his eyes.

“And boy, are they p***ed off.”

No Off Switch: An Autobiography, published by Serpent’s Tail, is out now and available for £17.09 (RRP £18.99), with free p&p, on 0845 2712134; thetimes.co.uk/bookshop