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RIP Andy Kershaw

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News has just come through that Andy Kershaw has sadly passed away at the age of 66. I know many
were critical of his marriage/post marriage issues but I always regarded this as a side issue that was really only for him to sort out. Only thing I would say is that his kids eventually chose to live with him which probably says more than either of the two protagonists said on the matter.
I loved his autobiography No off switch which was hugely entertaining and illuminating. His love of World music knew no limits and he even put the Bound boys up at his house so that they could afford to tour in the UK.
I saw him play a DJ set in Leamington a few years ago. I spoke with him about his love of Haiti and also asked him about an artist whose music he played. He emailed me with the artist name and label and where I could obtain it.
Top bloke with an immense love for music.

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  3. Such sad news – in his day, a true character. Still chuckle when remembering his interviews with Sting and Phil Collins at Live Aid. I loved that voice, always discoursing volubly and passionately about the great music he brought to wunnerful Radio One (and latterly Three) over the years.

  4. I will raise a glass to him tonight . Always loved his enthusiastic love for music and I must dig out his book again as loved it first time around . He will be missed.

  5. Bit of a shock to me, was unaware that he was sick. Always seemed like one of the good guys at the BBC. Was a shame about his personal issues, but I know from bitter personal experience that such things can produce a kind of temporary insanity when children are involved (and my daughter opted to live with me too in the end)

  6. Sad news. He was great on OGWT. His interview with ZZ Top was a classic. “What do good old boys do?”.

    The Graun was decent enough not to go into his marital problems which were no ones business but those involved.

      • You can rely on the Mail for that – the moment somebody famous dies, a story usually appears about some scandal or incident (no matter how trivial or long ago) they were involved in, with little said about their good works or the talent(s) that made them famous in the first place.

        Also, I don’t want to derail the thread, but does anybody know why the Mail hates the BBC with such passion? Even the most tenuous link becomes an excuse to hammer the Beeb for some imagined failing. Did the BBC once run a story about the Mail’s editor or bosses that has never been forgiven or forgotten, and so it must be given a kicking at every opportunity?

        • The Mail, and other titles’ grievance with the BBC is down to its size and its guaranteed budget from public funding. They feel it shouldn’t be in local radio, mass-market TV, promoting the Proms etc, because those are all things the private sector – ie them – could be making money from.

          • I don’t read it but my parents do, and Dad is no fan of the BBC so I often hear second-hand versions of the anti-BBC stories.

            In my former life as a journalist I had to read all the national press, and learnt just how awful the Daily Hate was. It hasn’t improved.

    • Same here. Our musical tastes were far apart, but I admired his in-depth knowledge and his enthusiasm, which must have brought a lot of attention to little-known artists and genres. RIP.

  8. There aren’t many like Andy Kershaw, nice guy, truth teller, no B.S. came from his mouth only real enthusiasm for the job he had which was playing music. It was the type of music I loved and still love. I always had time for the man and was never let down.

    R.I.P. Andy.

        • Of course none of the responsibility, for plying the interviewee with all those pints of beer, is taken by the interviewer. A bit reminiscent of a latter day piece about an ailing John Martyn, where, what larks, the writer gleefully describes smuggling in a bottle of hooch, past Martyn’s partner, and recording the inevitable outcome. Irrespective of whether either Martyn or Kershaw were curate’s eggs of people: not all good or bad, it seems cheap reportage to me. Shock, horror, sparks alight if you pour petrol on a struck match!

          • I agree with you about irresponsible and provocative interviewing techniques, especially if your subject likes alcohol and has a short fuse.
            But even lovers of Martyn’s music can acknowledge that he was a cnut…I don’t recognise the Kershaw that I remember from the hagiography elsewhere in this thread. If you don’t want to be harried by “The Man”, then don’t harass your ex-partner in defiance of court orders.
            He was a troubled man. I’m sorry to hear that he’s died. But he was no saint.

            • Yes, he could be, and was, a rotter. He also littered his social media with some fairly cranky theories until, I suspect, his friend/producer told him it was affecting the size of his podcast audience (his only source of income).

              But that interview was from the depths, 18 years ago, and he turned his life around for the last decade or so.

              • Most probably, Andy wasn’t the goodest of good guys, had a drink problem etc etc but, as Dai mentioned earlier, divorce can bring out the worst in just about anybody. My one was overall reasonably amicable but there were periods in there where I didn’t recognise myself, said and did pretty rotten things and generally behaved like a complete berk.

                • Yes, I never defied any court orders but I did one thing in particular which was pretty crazy. Not proud of it, but at the time it appeared completely rational
                  to me. Soon after that I stopped drinking for an extended period

          • There’s no doubt that interviewers will manipulate sometimes. However the similarity between the pieces, and the way some of what happened was being airbrushed suggests AK was keen to get his story across.

  10. From Northumbrian pipes to Township Jit via Bulgaria and Nashville, his musical peregrinations have cost me dearly over the years. His tones, dulcet and unaffected, have accompanied me through many an evening’s listening. I shall miss The Kershaw Kid greatly. Gentle condolences to friends and family.

  11. I met him once outside Dewsbury Town Hall which was then my place of work. I seen him a couple of days before at a Swarbrick tribute concert and chatted with him about it and thanked him for introducing me via the radio to such great music. I remember writing down Ali Farke Toure phonetically after listening to him on AK’s show.

    He was outside work doing a piece for the 1 show about travelling dentist’s providing free work for people who couldn’t afford the work.

  12. However much I fondly remember Peel’s Perfumed Garden, Andy Kershaw introduced me to more music than anyone ever and since. Add in his radio programmes (Haiti, stone cold classics) and gosh and a golly – a real legend. May he be up there somewhere enthusing about Richard Thompson’s guitar, the joy of the Bhundu Boys or whatever next joy he has just discovered.

  15. He was diagnosed with cancer in January – on a post he said he was in fine spirits and fully intended go outlive Trump, Putin and Ant and Dec. Sadly he failed in this mission.
    The author Ian Clayton wrote a fabulous tribute to him on FB – I will see if I can find it because it is really well written and poignant.

    • @SteveT I often see Ian in Pontefract at the Cat Club.

      Here’s his tribute.
      I heard on the BBC one o’clock news today that my friend Andy Kershaw has died.

      I had last exchanged texts with Andy at the end of January when I let him know that I’d become a grandfather. He had told me then that he had cancer, but was determined to stay alive longer than Netanyahu, Trump and Ant and Dec. It was a typically defiant message, but tinged as well with something else. He put a x at the end of his messages. Andy didn’t usually bother which such trivial pleasantries.

      We first met in 2011 through Jim and Sue Mclaughlin who organised the Musicport festival at Whitby. Andy had just published his autobiography ‘No off Switch’ and Jim was keen to feature an interview with Andy about the book. He wanted me to conduct the interview. I was delighted to be asked. I’d first come across Andy in the middle of the 1980’s when I listened to him on my wireless playing South African township jive records. I remember his dulcet east Lancashire tones saying ‘That was a track called ‘Ingvawuma Blues by Kid Malume’ it’s out now on a compilation from Audiotrax records.’ I thought then it was one of the best sentences I’d heard said on the radio.

      I prepared really well for the interview with Andy. I held a magnifying glass up to his book and looked and listened to everything I could get my hands on, including old VHS recordings of Live Aid, which he famously presented as a wet behind the ears, 24 year old novice TV presenter and the Old Grey Whistle Test, including a strange off the cuff chat he did with Bob Dylan after presenting him with a jar of bramble jam.

      I needn’t have bothered. The hour long interview I did with Andy at Musicport turned into a wildly improvised and chaotic conversation where Andy started answering questions that I hadn’t yet asked and I struggled to keep up with the pace he set. People still tell me that it was great fun, really educational and a wonderful insight into the possibilities of music. I’m not sure about that, but it was a thrill a minute, like being on a wall of death motorbike ride at an old fairground. Afterwards Andy and me carried the conversation on in the green room for another few hours. It turned out we had a lot in common. We were roughly the same age, both born in 1959, me in September, him in November. We both remembered Chris Bonnington climbing ‘The Old Man of Hoy’ on a live BBC TV broadcast in 1967, we had vivid memories about the moon landing and we had both queued for tickets to see Bob Dylan on his 1978 British tour and had been changed by hearing him play live, him at Earls Court, me at Blackbushe. We both loved Sterns African record shop in London and shared a passion for the recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins. We also shared a similar sense of humour, a fondness for old music hall songs and jokes, an appreciation for the downright bizarre and we liked smoking, we smoked like kipper house chimneys.

      A week or two after Musicport, Andy told me that his publisher had organised a British tour, thirty odd nights in theatres and large art centres. He wanted to read from his book, but the interview with me had given him an idea. How would I like to join him as his ‘inquisitor’ as he put it. I said ‘You don’t need somebody to interview you, just do it yourself.’ He said ‘But I don’t know when to stop and you know how to interject and rein me in!’ In the end I agreed.

      We set off the tour on a bitterly cold night in Penzance in January 2012. The interview followed much the same template as the one at Musicport. I asked a few questions. Andy spun stories about being an eye witness to much of the social history of the late twentieth/early twenty first century. The time he was ambushed in Rwanda and followed lorry tyre tracks on a dirt road to avoid stepping on landmines, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, threatening to punch Simon Bates in the face in a BBC studio after he had maligned the coal miners during the strike, a run in with the Ton Ton Macoute in Haiti, an introduction to the man ‘who knows everything’ in a library in North Korea. One fantastic story tumbling out after another and all spiced and punctuated with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music from blues, to folk to soul and of course global sounds. And he had the best playlist you ever heard, an edited one for the theatres and a longer one for the car, Neil Young, who he modelled his dress sense on, Joni Mitchell, I can’t hear ‘Carey get out your cane,’ without thinking of Andy and the soul singer James Carr, Warren Zevon, Alpha Blondy, Thunderclap Newman and on it goes…

      On the night in Penzance, I also got a clear insight into why Andy’s book was called ‘No off Switch’ (as if I needed one). The show ran over by at least an hour, we then sat around drinking little bottles of Belgian beer Andy had stuffed into a suitcase and then at midnight he wanted to go for a curry. I don’t know we found an open curry house in Penzance at that time in the winter months, but we did. Then he wanted to drink some more beer and as we turned in for the night, he said, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot, we need to be up at 5, because I’ve got a live radio spot in Plymouth at 8.’ And so it went, like that for the next few weeks, in Dartmouth, Bristol, Oxford, Derby, Barnsley and no sleep until Goole. I asked him in an unguarded moment, ‘Do you ever sleep.’ He looked at me as though I had gone daft, ‘Nah, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ I was a bit relieved when the tour had to be cut short before the end, because Andy ran out of books to sell.

      I look back now though and remember it with a lot of affection, because amongst all of the lack of sleep, the hundred mile an hour performance and the surreal storytelling about international events that none of us, except Andy get to experience, I did get close to him and we became good friends. Occasionally on stage and certainly in the back of the tour car, Andy told me beautiful stories about more personal things he had done, about how he had taken Biggie Tembo the leader of his heroes The Bhundu Boys, to meet his gran one Christmas and how he’d mused on butterflies landing on piles of discarded clothes on a roadside during the Rwandan genocide.

      And when boredom set in during motorway miles, I got Andy to remember the names of the songs that had been sung to him by a choir of singing waitresses in Pyongyang. I’d have to put my thinking cap on to recall more, but ‘Peace on the end of my bayonet’ was one, ‘The love in my trench’ was another. Great fun, so much so, that towards the end of the tour we were performing the names of these songs as a kind of dada poem. The never-ending possibilities of music as Andy said.

      We have stayed in touch, not in each other’s pockets, but to wish each other Happy Birthday and doing the odd appearance together, to talk about, well Bob Dylan and all that other bullshit. We also had a running joke about Belarus. Andy was the most well-travelled man I ever met, but was always impressed that I’d managed to make a film in Belarus and stayed in a hotel in Minsk with Belarussian Olympic athletes.

      I need to let this sad news about Andy settle. I may write more as we go along. For now, sleep well old lad. X.

  17. It was actually posts about his behaviour on the old Word site which led me to the Forum. I used to look at Charlie Gillett’s website. He posted that he wished that his blog page as lively as The Word’s. I think there was about 200 comments on the Kershaw discussion.

    I used to enjoy his radio reviews in the Independent. I wasn’t such a fan of his radio show, I do remember his handover to Mary Ann Hobbs at the end of a show. She had been in a Sunday paper talking about her wild youth. He pointed out to her that if she was the age she claimed to be, then these things must have happened when she was 7 years old! That did not go down well at all. 😀

  19. I’ve just remembered I met him after a talk at a literature festival. He’d been asked in the Q and A if there was a band he wished he’d seen, his answer was The Band.

    Getting my book signed I mentioned I’d seen The Band “Were you at the Wembley stadium concert?”

    “I was.”

    “Bastard”

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