DJ Andy Kershaw passed away last week and he’s been in my head ever since. He’s someone who I haven’t thought about for a while, hadn’t heard for longer. But his passing stirred up some ghosts.
As a result, I’ve been thinking about a lot about radio, the intimacy of it and the part it plays in our lives. Or mine at least.
Kershaw’s death prompted the inevitable tributes for his very distinctive broadcasting style. Those tributes weren’t as effusive as those that followed, say, the death of Johnnie Walker or Steve Wright, but then Kershaw was a very different kind of broadcaster and a very different personality.
What made him stand out on the radio - that sometimes bristling, abrasive dogmatism he brought to everything - was also the thing some found difficult to take. And there will be those who knew of his treatment of his ex-wife - he was jailed for breaching a restraining order three times - and judge him accordingly.
If it’s possible to set the latter aside - and I’m not convinced we should - I have to admit my own contested relationship with him as a listener. There is no question that he was a unique broadcaster who made programmes that no one else would have or could have. His documentaries from Mali and Haiti and his reports about genocide in Rwanda and civil wars in Angola and Sierra Leone for Radio 4’s Today programme were not what you would expect from a former Radio 1 DJ. But then he’d never been a typical Radio 1 DJ. His embracing of world music made his transfer to Radio 3 - perhaps the only successful such switch between the two stations - almost inevitable.
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Kershaw was just a few years older than me and so I grew up with him on the radio in my twenties and thirties. And I found him both funny, entertaining and exasperating. Mostly exasperating, if I’m honest. His passion for music was infectious, his dismissal of those who had different tastes a little tiresome.
I’ve been thinking about my exasperation these last few days. Why was I so bothered by a voice on the radio? It occurs to me now that this says as much about me as it does about him. Perhaps my own people-pleasing tendencies struggled with someone who was patently disinterested in pleasing anyone. But also, let’s be honest, there are times when I can be dogmatic and abrasive too.
We see ourselves in others and maybe we don’t like what we see. I have always wondered why I struggle with Nicky Campbell who is clearly a talented broadcaster. I wonder if it’s because his desire to express his cleverness is something I see in myself? (The difference being that Campbell actually is clever, of course.)
And there is something about radio, I think, that amplifies these identifications and reactions. It’s the intimacy of the form; of that voice speaking into your ear.
Combine that directness of communication with the fact that radio is interwoven into the day-to-day reality of our lives in a way TV can’t be. We listen while we wash the dishes, make the dinner, and go on the school run. It is, for many, the background of our lives. And the voices we hear are so familiar because we hear them every day.
As such they become part of our lives. I can’t have been the only one who felt a little fillip of joy at the weekend to hear Kenny MacIntyre back presenting Sportsound on Radio Scotland after his prostate cancer treatment.
If I think about it I have memories stretching back to childhood associated with radio. Sitting with my sisters eating breakfast while listening to Ed “Stewpot” Stewart on Junior Choice, searching through the static for Steve Wright on Radio Luxembourg in my teenage bedroom in the late 1970s, sterilising baby bottles in the late 1990s while John Peel played the Bristol band Flying Saucer Attack. It is always with us.
This may be why there is always such an outpouring of grief or a sense of loss when someone we know - or think we know - from the world of radio dies. Because they have been in our lives for so long and seem close to us even though we have probably never met them.
And that’s why, I think, radio broadcasters provoke such strong reactions for good or ill. Andy Kershaw certainly always did.
The strange contradiction is that from the outside radio can seem so ephemeral; this inconsequential background noise to our daily lives full of banal gossip and pop tunes we’ve heard a million times. Sometimes that is exactly what it is. Which, on reflection, may be why broadcasters like Andy Kershaw matter. Because he wanted radio to be more than that.
Listen Out For: Radio 3 in Concert, Radio 3, Monday, April 27, 7.30pm
Recorded at the Royal Festival Hall, Scotland’s own Nicola Benedetti joins the Philharmonia to play Elgar’s Violin Concerto. Debussy and Chaminade are also on the programme.
