Andy Kershaw R.I.P.
The following piece appeared in issue 171 of The Rider’s Digest but given Andy’s recent departure it seemed appropriate to move it onto the website so that it’s accessible to a wider audience. Unfortunately we seem to have misplaced the original photographs so we have reproduced the article from the PDF so you can see how it looked (if you right click on the individual images you can open them in a new tab at a more viewable size). We have also shared the words below to make it easier to read what Blez said.
You might also be interested to read Andy’s answers to our 10 Riders’ Lives questions here.
ANDY KERSHAW
Paul Blezard meets the outspoken citizen of Rochdale and the world; as fanatical about motorcycles as he is about music and travel
I first met Andy Kershaw during TT week in 1994 at the cottage he was sharing with John Peel in Kirkmichael, right on the TT course itself. The Radio 1 presenters used to rent the cottage every year during the races and as I knew the late, great, JP a little bit he’d invited me to drop by. I remember having a great chat with John, but that Andy seemed a bit subdued and spent much of the time I was there in the garden. It took me eighteen years to find out why. I now know that he’d only just got back from witnessing the almost unimaginable slaughter in Rwanda and had barely escaped with his life.
Andy’s had more than a few ups and downs since then. His whole life seems to have been a metaphorical rollercoaster and he’s already crammed more adventure and excitement into his 53 years than most people would if they were reincarnated several times over. His broad Rochdale tones are as distinctive as Peelie’s sub-Merseyside voice was and I shall forever be grateful to the pair of them for introducing me to the joyful, jangling sound of African ‘High Life’ music through their respective shows on Radio 1 in the 1980s.
I knew Andy was a keen biker before I met him because he used to talk about his annual pilgrimage to the Isle of Man every June on his radio show. The fact that he’d managed to persuade the non-biking Mr Peel to join him as a regular fixture says a lot about his enthusiasm for motorcycles, the TT and Mona’s Isle. In fact he was so enthusiastic about the place that in 2006 he actually moved there lock, stock and barrel with his partner of seventeen years and their two children; to the town of Peel, in fact, on the west side of the island. There’s a terrible irony in the fact that the place he’d loved enough to move to became a major factor in his dramatic ‘fall from grace’ which saw him incarcerated several times and featured regularly in the UK tabloids in 2007 and 2008.
Suffice it to say here that three sayings come to mind about this troubled time: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”, “the demon drink” and “Act in haste, repent at leisure”. If you want to know more, a quick Google for “Andy Kershaw” will reveal many sad accounts of “the year my world fell apart” as The Independent headlined their exclusive interview with AK when he was literally ‘on the run’ from the Isle of Man authorities and reported missing by his own sister and fellow-broadcaster, Liz Kershaw.
The Resurrection of Andy Kershaw and A Confusion of Paul Blezards
Happily, these days, the first page of an AK Google search will be dominated by references to his autobiography, ‘No Off Switch’, which has garnered the highest praise from the great and the good, from Stephen Fry to Fergal Keane. And it was ‘No Off Switch’ which led, in a roundabout way, to my second meeting with Mr Kershaw eighteen years after the first. A very roundabout way. Pay attention, readers, because it’s a bizarre tale of mistaken identity, modern meedja and social networking. Briefly, about three years ago, I was unexpectedly invited to one of the famous monthly Private Eye lunches that take place every month above a well-known pub in Soho. Upon arrival I was asked by the Eye’s deputy editor, Francis Wheen, who I was and when I told him he said, memorably, “You’re not Paul Blezard, you don’t look anything like him!” I pointed out that I’d been Paul Blezard for a lot longer than the bloke he was thinking of, a young ‘impostor’ whose real name is Paul Blezard-Gymer and who is best known for his interviews with writers at literary festivals. I ended up having a most agreeable lunch anyway and discovered, to my surprise, that Francis Wheen is a good friend of Andy Kershaw’s.
Fast forward a couple of years and through the far-reaching tentacles of Facebook I became FB friends with my namesake, then with Francis Wheen via him and then with Andy K via Francis W. When I discovered that AK and the other PB were both going to be at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival I introduced them to each other by remote control and when Andy came to the London Literature Festival to talk about No Off Switch he invited both Paul Blezards to join him. Sadly, my namesake couldn’t make it because he was occupied elsewhere in a different section of the Festival but I had the great pleasure of listening to Andy talk about his life and his autobiography interviewed by his friend and fellow foreign correspondent Fergal Keane.
Sitting on the top floor of the Royal Festival Hall, with beautiful summertime evening views across the capital we got an extremely entertaining couple of hours, illustrated with some of the most striking photos in No Off Switch and a musical interlude from Steve Tillets on acoustic guitar at half time.
Andy talked about his childhood in Rochdale, growing up as the son of a headmaster, his job offer from Motorcycle News before he even went to Leeds University and how his unpaid but fulltime job as Entertainments Secretary cost him his degree; how he put on Dire Straits and Ian Dury on successive nights and fell out with Bob Geldof when he caught him tearing down posters for the Clash.
Ironically, in view of that little contretemps with Saint Bob, the book starts with Andy’s appearance at Live Aid, having had a meteoric rise in the music industry. He ended his time at Uni helping to put on the Rolling Stones outdoor concert in Leeds and then rose from obscurity within the course of a single year, from being Billy Bragg’s roadie to getting his own show on Radio 1, and co-presenting The Old Grey Whistle Test. He was twenty five, but looked about fifteen!
Kershaw talked warmly about life in the BBC office that he shared with John Peel and their great Radio 1 producer John Walters, whom I remember as an extremely entertaining broadcaster in his own right. He also made it clear that he’s not embarrassed to be compared (as he often has been) with John Noakes, the legendary and fearless northern Blue Peter presenter from the 60s and 70s – and nor should he be!
After his ‘world music’ show was bumped off Radio 1, it was resurrected on Radio 3 by popular demand and Andy re-invented himself as a foreign correspondent for Radio 4, the World Service and the serious newspapers. He specialised in visiting some of the most tyrannically ruled and dangerous places on earth, from Haiti to North Korea and Angola to Zimbabwe, along with the aforementioned Rwanda. And all the time he was collecting music from wherever he went. He’s visited half the countries on the planet and his record collection weighs seven tons!
After the disastrous collapse of the relationship with the mother of his children, which resulted in him being forcibly separated from them for a long time, it was great to see his joy at having them with him at the Festival Hall talk. It’s also great to see that he’s recently been working for the BBC again, on both radio and TV.
Still Motorcycling after all these years
I remember seeing Andy test a Harley-Davidson on the original, pre-Clarkson Top Gear programme and I was amazed to discover that he’s now owned the same XL 883 Harley for 22 years. There’s no accounting for taste! He’s also been taking really top class photographs of motorcycle racers since he first started going to bike races in the mid-70s. He skived off school to go to his first TT races in 1975 (which, by coincidence, was the first year I attended with my Honda CB 450 Black Bomber) and a photo that he took, aged 16, at his first visit to the Scarborough ‘Cock of the North’ road races was actually used on the cover of the following year’s programme. The very day that I wrote this story, he posted on his Facebook page a fantastic shot of Mike Hailwood at Donington Park on the Sports Motorcycles Ducati. He took it with a basic Zenith SLR camera in July 1978, the month after Mike’s legendary comeback TT win on the bike.
By pure coincidence, the weekend of Andy’s Friday evening talk at the Royal Festival Hall coincided with the Festival of 1,000 bikes at Mallory Park and since we were both going to be there, we agreed to meet up.
I had the great pleasure of riding Andy Tribble’s 1987 Peraves Ecomobile up to Mallory on the Saturday evening, arriving just as dusk was falling and my friends on the Feet First stand were enjoying a barbecue. After much discussion of the joys of Quasars, Phasars, Voyagers, Monotracers and the like I retired to the passenger seat of the Ecomobile for the night, secure in the knowledge that I was the only person at the event who would be sleeping in the motorcycle they’d ridden there!
On the Sunday morning I sauntered down to the paddock to find Mr Kershaw chain smoking and crapping himself at the prospect of riding Dean Want’s immaculate Harris-framed monoshock TZ350. He’d ridden on circuits before, but never on a pukka racer and was doubly nervous since later in the day he was due out on the track in some very exalted company, including several of his boyhood heroes such as Alex George and Chas Mortimer. (For what it’s worth I once took part in a moped race at which Alex was the most illustrious competitor and I once crashed one of Chas’s race school RD400s at Donington Park while leading the pack into the wet chicane on the penultimate lap…….).
Anyway, AK needn’t have worried. While it’s fair to say that he was in no danger of getting his knee down, he circulated without incident and must have enjoyed it because he went back for more of the same on Dean’s TZ at Donington a few weeks later.
A few highlights of the Mallory track action for me were watching Kevin Schwantz going as fast as ever on one of his old Suzukis round Devil’s Elbow, Phil Read Senior riding the hub centre steered Alto Performance Vyrus, Randy Mamola pulling wheelies two-up in the wet on the passenger-carrying Ducati MotoGP bike and the ageless Sammy Miller on the 1957 dustbin-faired V8 which was pictured in TRD 169.
Off the track, the final highlight of the event was meeting and chatting to the lovely Rachel Clegg whose extremely original TT calendar photos and shapely form were featured in TRD 166. It was only when her parents appeared that I realised she was the daughter of Noel Clegg, an old friend and racing mate of Mr Kershaw whom I’d been introduced to earlier in the day by Andy. And it was only when I was looking through my photos that I realised that I’d actually snapped Noel, Andy and Rachel together earlier in the day.
My ride back to London was enlivened by giving bike designer and cartoonist John Mockett a ride in the Ecomobile and by paying a visit with him to Gill Duckworth, widow of the brilliant Keith, co-founder of Cosworth and designer of the V8 Cosworth F1 engine. It was a kind of action replay of my first visit to the Duckworth residence in Northants twenty years before when Peter Williams directed me there from to show the striking cabin motorcycle to Keith. All in all, it had been an action-packed and very entertaining weekend.
Andy Kershaw is doing several more talks this autumn and I can guarantee that if attend you will be thoroughly entertained by him even if you don’t necessarily agree with his firmly held and always articulately voiced opinions. I’ll end with just one from the book. Talking of his teenage circle of schoolfriends at Hulme Grammar in Oldham he says, “Though there was not the tyranny of football that there is now, we resented even then the assumption that we should be obsessed by it. A liking for football, and worse – admiring football culture, became very reliable indicators of the wanker.” Do yourself a favour and go and hear him talk.
Paul Blezard
Andy Kershaw’s book No Off Switch is published this week in paperback and will soon be available as a talking book. More at: www.andykershaw.co.uk
