Andy Kershaw: No Off Switch

 

To commemorate the recent death of Andy Kershaw here are some notes from 2012 about his engaging memoir No Off Switch.

 

I have almost finished reading Andy Kershaw's autobiography, No Off Switch. I have to admit I didn't read it in order, darting first to his experience of the wunnerful BBC youth station. Gambaccini was one of the few DJs who were looked on kindly by Johns Peel and Walters and their unexpected offspring Kershaw (who sat, Oor Wullie-like, on an unpturned bucket in Room 318, there being no room amid the clutter for a third chair). Radio 1 bosses may have been looking for a rival to, and eventual replacement for, John Peel, but putting him in the same office as Peel and Walters, his producer, "almost guaranteed we became brothers-in-arms", reinforcing Peel's position and creating "a radio station within a radio station."

 In no time at all, we set about erecting the barricades. Few of our Radio 1 colleagues were allowed across the threshold. Fellow DJs given rare access were Paul Gambaccini (whom we considered our intellectual equal and a fellow music obsessive), Annie Nightingale (battle-hardened survivor), Alan Freeman (lovely old cove), Janice Long (our scally mate) and Kid Jensen (nice lad).

No Off Switch is a very enjoyable read and I regret not starting at the beginning. In  fact I am now almost at Chapter One: for me, if for no other reader, Kershaw keeps getting younger and younger. The Peel stuff is fascinating, because it's by the one surviving member of that triumvirate. Peel is remembered fondly by his protege but not as a latter-day saint. In particular, Kershaw records occasions when Peel was too frightened about his own position to stick up for the younger DJ, only to find himself similarly dumped on by Radio 1 some years later. It's not particularly bitter: Kershaw notes that Peel had a family to support by that time. But it's Walters who receives more praise, as the man who went in to battle for Peel and Kershaw and enabled them to survive for so long.

When - the bruiser Walters having long retired - Peel finds himself under threat, his programmes pushed further and further into the night - in an effort, Kershaw says, by Andy Parfitt to demoralise him without having "John's broadcasting blood on his hands" - Kershaw suggests he speaks to Jenny Abramsky, Controller of Network Radio, and threaten to walk out on Radio 4's Home Truths, by then "a national institution."

 "Oh no," he murmured, "I couldn't possibly do that."
His last words to me, before he shambled away towards Oxford Circus, were, "It's killing me."

Some weeks later he went on the holiday to Peru where he died of a heart attack:

Just minutes before he was struck down, John sighed to Sheila, "I do miss Walters."

The Peel and Walters material is a relatively small part of the book, which also includes details of the painful split with his partner and separation from his children, his obsession with motorcycles, his gradual immersion in music - which I'm only learning about in retrospect, so kids, read this the right round: it's not Betrayal by Harold Pinter, you get me? But it is sparkling and funny throughout. Alright, at times individual sentences get the tiniest bit convoluted, but that's a negligible price to pay for a fairground ride like this. 

 

Excerpted from a longer post here. 

Guardian obituary of Andy Kershaw here.