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The Adventures of Andy Kershaw
When: Sunday 18th March 2012 - Doors: 7.30 - 8.15pm
Where: The Glee Club, Mermaid Quay, Cardiff, CF10 5BZ
Legendary broadcaster, journalist and musical adventurer shares his autobiography ‘No Off Switch’
Andy Kershaw truly has no off switch. Already he’s lived ten lives to everyone else’s one.
As a teenager, he was promoting major rock gigs. He was Billy Bragg’s driver and roadie one day and presenting Whistle Test and Live Aid the next.
A born rebel and a maverick, he’s combined his passion for music with a lunatic curiosity and an instinct for frontline journalism, reporting for the BBC and the broadsheets from the world’s most extreme countries – Iraq, North Korea (he’s been four times), Haiti, Angola and Rwanda during the genocide.
Andy is among the UK’s most-decorated broadcasters, working for Radio 4 and, for fifteen years, as a Radio 1 DJ, where he shared an office with John Peel and legendary producer John Walters.
It was Andy’s enthusiasms that made him the central figure in the popularisation of world music. More recently a presenter on Radio 3, he has also worked for the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. His record collection weighs seven tons and he’s seen his own intestines. He’s been knocked down but he’s back up again – as strong as a monkey’s tail!
Andy Kershaw was born in Rochdale in 1959 and was liberated by Bob Dylan. Barely out of his teens, and looking about eleven, he presented Whistle Test and Live Aid for the BBC.
For most of the past twenty-five years he has had a weekly radio show pioneering extraordinary music from all over the world.
He is also a serious foreign journalist, having reported for – among others – Independent, Daily Telegraph, Observer and BBC Radio 4’s Today, The World Tonight and From Our Own Correspondent. His life has been like High Fidelity amplified ten-fold. In a war zone.
Whether it applies to foreign adventures, romances, motorcycles, nervous breakdowns or relationships with a piece of music, Andy has always lived by his most reliable maxim: if you’re going to have one, have a big one.
‘Without you we wouldn’t know nothin’!’ - Joe Strummer, The Clash
‘The greatest living English-language broadcaster’ - New Statesman
‘Fabulously well-written - the wit, the brimming enthusiasm and the outrage’ - Word
‘A groundbreaking DJ…Kershaw has had one hell of a life’ - Independent on Sunday
‘A highly passionate, opinionated, witty, enlightening account of the broadcaster’s career, personal life and worldview’ - Record Collector
‘He made me travel a little further than I usually do! He has an ability to do things first and ask questions afterwards. Not a recipe for a safe, secure life, maybe, but it makes things a lot more interesting for the rest of us! Such an enthusiast” - Michael Palin