As part of the Long Division festival in Wakefield Andy Kershaw talked about his life’s adventures. Ivor Tymchak went along to hear him and discovers that he only seems to have one t-shirt for all his travel photos and that “all the detail” is revealed in his book …
At one point, Andy tells us that he was pitched into the deep end of the Pacific Ocean when he was asked to present on live TV during the Live Aid concert. With an estimated audience of a billion people, he described his ‘unconscious incompetence’ that allowed him to bluff his way through the pressure of the moment.
And that is pretty much how he got through his entire presentation for the evening. Admittedly, the audience numbers were lower than Live Aid’s but I’ll bet Andy was probably just as nervous on this occasion as he could actually make eye contact with those watching.
He constantly paced the stage like a condemned man on the eve of his execution waiting to hear if he’d been pardoned or not. This meant that he invariably walked in front of the projector blocking the image that was projected onto the smallest screen I had ever seen. He didn’t use a clicker either and so occasionally stabbed the wrong key on the laptop when trying to advance the slide, bringing up some unwanted menu. His mobile phone went off whilst he was on stage and his technical assistant didn’t help him either – after building up a musical track with hyperbole he would shout “Hit it, Tom!” and … we waited … and waited … Now, timing to a DJ is everything, so this must have been as painful for Andy as it was for the audience. When the track finally sounded, Andy simply continued to pace the stage but didn’t speak. Once, he pointed to a detail on the laptop screen rather than the projected image, such was his ineptness at stagecraft.
So, it was a complete disaster then?
Er, no actually, his irrepressible enthusiasm and fascinating stories more than compensated for his lack of artifice. His life seems to have been punctuated with one lucky break after another – he gets a telephone call whilst still at Leeds University from the Rolling Stones management asking him if he’d like to organise the Roundhay Park gig, a TV producer casually asks him if he’d like to present on The Old Grey Whistle Test … He even had the distinction of becoming a Radio One DJ without ever having the ambition to do so – to which audience member Martin Kelner (a long time friend) added that he also had the distinction of being the only Radio One DJ of that period not to be investigated by the authorities. This got the biggest laugh of the evening.
He spoke at some length about his tenure at Radio One and clearly had great affection for the legendary producer John Walters about whom he couldn’t speak highly enough.
But the thing that I didn’t know about Andy was his activities as a foreign correspondent and I found this section to be of most interest. His passion for the people of Rwanda and Haiti was clear to see and he was visibly moved as he told his (mostly) tragic stories of the people he had met there.
The fervent applause at the end of the evening demonstrated the huge affection he enjoyed with the paying audience and he was obviously amongst friends. I have to confess that I wasn’t a fan of his radio shows so I couldn’t be classed as one of his friends, which means that because I left after two hours in his company suitably entertained and informed, he must have been doing something right.