Why Rochdale is at the epicentre of world music

Andy Kershaw: No Off Switch

ANDY KERSHAW is the British broadcaster largely known for his championing of world music. He is 51, a surprisingly mature age for anyone in British entertainment publishing his first autobiography.

Thankfully, he has not only lived twice as long as many celebrities who pen their memoirs, his longevity has ensured that he has also crossed paths with many of the genuine talents who populated British popular music in the last decades of the 20th century.

In Kershaw’s opinion, anything that came after his heroes the Clash was almost by definition second rate, but even he must acknowledge that the poodle bands of the 1980s were creative geniuses compared to the clean-cut pups beloved of the mainstream record companies and broadcasters today. In such a context, Kershaw’s support of artists such as the Bhundu Boys from Zimbabwe and Ali Farka Touré from Mali seems almost heroic.

Kershaw writes affectionately of his upbringing in Rochdale, Lancashire, a town he reckons missed out entirely on the 1960s and only “finally emerged from the Second World War sometime around 1972”. His parents were both teachers who became school principals, and it seemed inevitable that he would go on to university. At the University of Leeds, he ran the entertainments office and booked acts as diverse as Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Iggy Pop and Duran Duran. The role distracted him so much that he never quite got around to graduating, though the college has since conferred him with an honorary degree.

Kershaw’s first professional gig involved organising a concert for the Rolling Stones in Leeds. Thereafter he improvised a career in popular entertainment that included stints as a radio DJ, television presenter and personal assistant to Billy Bragg on his early tours. One of Kershaw’s most prestigious television gigs was as co-presenter of Live Aid at Wembley in 1985. Far from being grateful for the exposure, he criticised Bob Geldof for failing to include a single African performer among the “boring and predictable” acts on the bill.

Twenty years later, he was even more scathing of Live 8, denouncing as “apartheid” its organisers’ decision to invite African musicians to perform at a separate concert at the Eden Project.

Kershaw’s opinions of major music acts can also be refreshingly brutal. His impression of U2, whom he first saw supporting Talking Heads in 1980, was of “a big bag of wind, an opinion which they have only reinforced in the intervening years”.

To his credit, Kershaw has worked extensively as a reporter from many of the political hotspots around the world, and he writes knowledgably, if sometimes a little naively, of the regimes in such countries as Haiti and Rwanda.

Kershaw’s life and career has not all been plain sailing. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 2007, and No Off Switch might be viewed of part of his recovery. Kershaw is sometimes guilty of excessive name-dropping, and of going on a bit — his book extends to over 400 pages — but it is hard to begrudge him his success. After all, not much else has come out of Rochdale.