No Off Switch by Andy Kershaw

Author:Andy Kershaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2011-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Just before take-off, about to fly stunts over the 1993 British Motorcycle Grand Prix at Donington Park. Somehow this foolishness benefited Save the Children and Riders For Health. It didn’t benefit me. It was terrifying. And I missed the 125cc race. Unknown

BEHIND THE DOOR of 318, Peel was a mass, if not a mess, of contradictions. Once he had grasped that our programmes were not in competition but complimentary, I became less of a threat and he returned happily and comfortably to his default Eeyore character – grumpy, wary and slightly resentful. I was by now, very publicly and musically, my own man.

Those John embraced fully were those who he considered no threat at all, who had no identity of their own and offered up to him only deference. As with most self-obsessed people, there was, underlying John, a fundamental insecurity. It was always noticeable that he resented the company of some of my more amusing friends and their capacity to hold an audience. Despite his reputation for modesty, and in his role of reluctant celebrity, he sulked if he were not the centre of attention. For someone so secure in his position, so admired and even regarded as a national institution, John needed, absurdly, constant reassurance if not flattery.

‘The Pig saved me from myself,’ he once sighed, over a drink, referring to Sheila, his adorable, one-in-a-million, down to earth wife and an indefatigable counterbalance of common sense to John’s neurosis. ‘God knows where I’d be or what I’d be like without her.’ Walters and I just raised our eyebrows to each other. Indeed.

At the same time, John and I frequently had huge fun together. We would tramp around the specialist record shops of central London, often spending more, in my case, than I earned from doing my programme. ‘You’re not still dancing the kwassa-kwassa, are you?’ he once remarked at the counter of Stern’s African Records, as he thumbed through my new Congolese purchases. ‘Don’t you know we dance-floor trend-setters moved on from all that simply weeks ago?’

On another occasion, sitting in 318 late one night, I heard him tell his listeners, ‘The Boy Kershaw is up in the office at the moment, going through the exciting new imports we bought this afternoon around London’s glamorous West End. I’ve warned him time and again, but the impetuous child won’t listen: he’ll never get anywhere at Radio 1 doing that, my goodness me… Here’s another one from The Fall…’

In those glory days when our programmes were on the air adjacent to each other – until a later regime, the one that thought it was clever, split us up like naughty schoolboys – we refined and pared down my handover to John, as a parody of those programme junctions of our daytime colleagues, into an exchange in which all we would say to each other for a few seconds was, ‘matey DJ chat, matey DJ chat’ until John banged in his first record.

Some of my happiest memories are of our holidays

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