Andy Kershaw's straight talk is very engaging

Last night, DJ, broadcaster, journalist and sometime war correspondent Andy Kershaw was doing his illustrated one-man show at Keighley’s Exchange Arts Centre.

The man from Rochdale, and now living in West Yorkshire, is one of those fortunate broadcasters who writes with the same fluency that he speaks. Reading his autobiography is like hearing him recounting stories in the pub, well almost – he’s not just regionally colloquial.

Right from the start he seems to have had his own voice, his own style. He never sounded like John Peel, with whom he worked for many years, or anybody else.

Buzzily curious about everything he encounters, always on the go – “I haven’t mastered the idea of leisure” – he doesn’t waste energy on verbal padding. You don’t have to infer much because he tells you what he thinks.

This is him on Bob Dylan: “I suppose I must have been aware of Bob since those early radio days with the little Perdio transistor and, around that time, no doubt, the detestable Lay Lady Lay. Small wonder I didn’t latch on to him straight away.

“Pop music radio did not, as a rule play Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again.”

John Peel may have played it – I first heard The Doors and Captain Beefheart on one of his programmes – but after the happy days of Radio Caroline popular music that went beyond the Tin Pan Alley format would have been relegated to late-night listening.

The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2 didn’t count – that was regarded as a reservation for bearded weirdies and bangle-wearing hippies smelling of patchouli oil.

Andy Kershaw, who has always seemed too young to be bearded, recounts how he met Dylan at Dave Stewart’s Crouch End studio in 1985, gave him a jar of home-made jam and persuaded him to be interviewed for Whistle Test.

“What followed, largely because I was in a state of shock and awe, and had no time for preparation, was the worst interview in my media career and a waste of the journalistic scoop of a lifetime.”

When you’ve won more Sony awards for broadcasting than anybody else, you can afford to be self-deprecating, except I think that Kershaw has enough humour and confidence to be self-critical without making a meal of it.

He has no time for superciliousness, fake modesty or pomposity. He looks at the world clear-sightedly, or so it seems to me from reading about his world travels (he’s been to 97 countries, some of them more than twice – North Korea four times).

“All bonkers countries are reliable producers and exporters of two commodities. Indeed, the production of extravagant postage stamps and cement is a vital qualification for membership of that exclusive club to which all mad dictators, cult of personality crackpots and military regimes aspire: the Community of Kershaw’s Potty Republics.”

Having witnessed terrible things in dangerous places in remote parts of the world, Kershaw had a nightmare of his own in 2008 when he found himself in Ludlow – on the run from the police.

This is the ‘fall’ part of his story which precedes the final chapter of this always engaging book. If you have any preconceptions about life, love and the music of the late Warren Zevon, No Off Switch will challenge them.