Andy Kershaw: “I have had enough sanctimoniousness from other people to last me a lifetime”

Andy Kershaw’s mobile phone is switched off.

It’s not the greatest surprise. A man who lives the kind of life the broadcaster does wouldn’t be expected to stick to something as mundane as a pre-arranged interview time.

Twenty minutes later, a breathless Kershaw calls, talking 10 to the dozen accompanied by a cacophony of background noise.

“I’ve just been on the tube and I’m carrying a backpack with BBC gear in it,” he says, the words tumbling out. “I’m just going to a Turkish café, my favourite in the whole world just opposite Broadcasting House. Let me get my breath back and we’ll talk. You can call m, can’t you? I’m still poor, have you got my number?” And he’s gone.

The Rochdale twang is instantly familiar and it’s the same voice which, so well-known from a 25-year career in broadcasting, which leaps from the pages of his autobiography, No Off Switch, which is published this week.

Allowing him a couple of minutes to get his breath back, when we speak he’s only just sat down and pauses to take a swig of tea.

“That’s better. Lovely,” he says, a signal, that he’s now ready to begin.

Kershaw is always in a garrulous mood – one word can send him off into an eloquent rant, so when I mention every interview I’ve read with him mentions his chain-smoking habit – even a piece written by his sister, fellow broadcaster Liz Kershaw – he’s off.

“Let me say this about the subject. It is no business of anyone else how much I smoke. The bossy interference of other people in our lives is one of the most frustrating aspects of this country today.

“I have had quite enough sanctimoniousness from other people to last a lifetime. It is no-one else’s damn business how much I smoke. I like smoking, and I don’t give a stuff what other people think or whether my smoking offends other people – I don’t see why it should and I couldn’t care less if it does.

“This prissy era was heralded by Blair and when he was regularly telling the country they shouldn’t smoke I saw it as my civic duty to go out and buy double the number of cigarettes.”

Attempts to quickly change the subject and talk instead about his autobiography, which has come after a very publicly dark period in his life, are thwarted. “You’ve got a great one up there for the smoking cause haven’t you? David Hockney. I’m right with David,” he says. I think he’s finished.

This ability to conjure up forceful sounding opinions, seemingly out of nowhere, and do so with such genuine passion, energy and zeal lay behind Kershaw’s extraordinary career.

It began, he says, when he followed his sister Liz to Leeds University in October 1978. The story is well-thumbed – Kershaw started out as the entertainments officer at the university, booking acts like Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Elvis Costello, The Clash and Iggy Pop. He also regularly turned down U2.

Only seven years later, in 1985, he helped to present Live Aid and had become one of his generation’s most in-demand broadcasters. What is less well known is that, according to Kershaw, it really all did come down to a single moment on his first day at university in the city.

“It’s true, exactly as I say it in the book,” says Kershaw. “It’s still something I can’t really explain. It was the first day, I went to register, so the authorities knew that I had arrived, then I asked where the man who booked the bands was. I walked straight up to him and said ‘I want your job’.

“I was a really, really shy kid, to this day I don’t know what happened or how I found it in myself to go up to him and say that. It was this one extraordinary moment, the first time I had ever done anything like that and if I hadn’t done that on that day, then my life would have been completely different.”

As it was, his meeting that day with Steve Henderson – now a lecturer at Leeds Met University – started Kershaw on a path filled with adventure, told with enormous fun in his autobiography.

It is difficult to know exactly what to call Kershaw – DJ, presenter, journalist, concert promoter. He’s clearly all of the above and then some, but back in 2007 he found himself on the receiving end of another tag.

“Fallen DJ, disgraced DJ, all the tabloids had me pinned,” he says, directing a fair proportion of ire at the broadsheets as well, who he accuses of never looking properly into what he describes as a sad tale.

The facts go something like this. In October 2006, he moved with his partner, Juliette Banner, and two children to the Isle of Man. She discovered Kershaw had been unfaithful to her and they separated. It was when she moved in with a new partner that the problems really began, with Kershaw accused of being both “menacing and provocative” to the couple. A dispute over the children was said to be at the heart of it, but when Kershaw found himself guilty of breaching a restraining order in 2007, the judge said his life was turning into a “Greek tragedy”.

Sentenced to three months in prison, it was the darkest of times for the broadcaster and it is something he writes about in No Off Switch – but not at length. However, when asked about his well-publicised difficulties, the fury is barely contained.

Kershaw, who was off-air for two years before being welcomed back to the BBC in 2010, clearly sees himself as the victim of an inadequate court system and of lazy journalism.

“But I have given that period of my life the significance it deserves by devoting just two chapters in my book to it,” he says. “That’s two out of 42 chapters, but it seems to be the instinctive position of most journalists to talk about that small part of my life as though people can’t let me move on from that. There are some great stories in there, stories about being at Radio One in the Smashy and Nicey era, about Rwanda. I am one of very few BBC journalists to go to Rwanda, I was there when all the other journalists were in South Africa enjoying the celebrations of the release of Nelson Mandela.

“What about those stories?”

Certainly, there is more to Kershaw than the man who a few years ago seemed hell bent on self-destruction.

He has reported for the BBC from three civil wars and a volcanic eruption, was Billy Bragg’s driver, roadie and tour manager and has a diverse range of fans. In 2000, when Radio 1 chief decided to axe Kershaw’s eclectic late-night show after 14 years, then Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik tabled an Early Day Motion in Parliament to bring it back.

“I was supposed to write this book 23 years ago, but I kept making excuses, a regular one being that I couldn’t do it until I’d been to North Korea once. I’ve been four times now, so I thought it was about time,” says Kershaw.

It’s going to be a fascinating to see what the next chapters in the story will hold.

Andy Kershaw, No Off Switch is published by Serpent’s Tail, priced £18.99 on July 7. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 08000 153232 or online at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk