Stephen Brown

Not as fat as I used to be.

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

My book is out!

https://t.co/3Hd54f5yFR

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

Class 387 in Great British Railways Livery at Brighton Station - 26/6/26 https://t.co/qWBXM1zROH via @YouTube

[richard bacon @richardpbacon]

Such a good advert

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

@MikeReadUK It’s a shame radio 2 didn’t get him to host Sounds of the Seventies when Bob Harris retired.

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

My thoughts with everyone affected by the train crash in Bedford this evening.

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

https://t.co/1Cggit8nWX

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

Trains at Brighton Station https://t.co/toQzhDgBBJ via @YouTube

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

@OldRoberts953 Lovely words Gareth

[fatfilmsparody @fatfilmsparody]

Ai has never been bigger.

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

Spirit of Adventure at the Kirklees Light Railway Steam Gala 2025 https://t.co/eoT7viubLA via @YouTube

[Tom Jamieson @jamiesont]

Keir Starmer has been a disappointment, but anyone calling him 'Britain's Worst Ever Prime Minister' in a world where Liz Truss & Boris Johnson exist must have been kicked in the head by a horse

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

Mark Gatiss: "I don't understand the antipathy towards Keir Starmer"

The actor – currently starring in a play lampooning fascism – argues that the PM is doing a good job, but from the press he gets "you'd think he was Vlad the Impaler".

Listen on the New Society podcast.

[Simon Harris @SimonHarrisMBD]

Yes - the BBC needs modernisation. It needs reform. It needs a lot of things. However, this TV Licensing advert from 1985 is a reminder that to simply and lazily ‘get rid of it’ would be cultural vandalism of the worst possible kind …

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

75069 and Sir Archibald Sinclair 34059 Two-Header at the Bluebell Railway https://t.co/e6gsmIcgHk via @YouTube

[Route @Route_News]

Godspeed Andy Kershaw. Here's a note his friend Ian Clayton posted today:

I heard on the BBC one o’clock news today that my friend Andy Kershaw has died.

I had last exchanged texts with Andy at the end of January when I let him know that I’d become a grandfather. He had told me then that he had cancer, but was determined to stay alive longer than Netanyahu, Trump and Ant and Dec. It was a typically defiant message, but tinged as well with something else. He put a x at the end of his messages. Andy didn’t usually bother which such trivial pleasantries.

We first met in 2011 through Jim Mclaughlin and Sue who organised the Musicport festival at Whitby. Andy had just published his autobiography ‘No off Switch’ and Jim was keen to feature an interview with Andy about the book. He wanted me to conduct the interview. I was delighted to be asked. I’d first come across Andy in the middle of the 1980’s when I listened to him on my wireless playing South African township jive records. I remember his dulcet east Lancashire tones saying ‘That was a track called ‘Ingvawuma Blues by Kid Malume’ it’s out now on a compilation from Audiotrax records.’ I thought then it was one of the best sentences I’d heard said on the radio.

I prepared really well for the interview with Andy. I held a magnifying glass up to his book and looked and listened to everything I could get my hands on, including old VHS recordings of Live Aid, which he famously presented as a wet behind the ears, 24 year old novice TV presenter and the Old Grey Whistle Test, including a strange off the cuff chat he did with Bob Dylan after presenting him with a jar of bramble jam.

I needn’t have bothered. The hour long interview I did with Andy at Musicport turned into a wildly improvised and chaotic conversation where Andy started answering questions that I hadn’t yet asked and I struggled to keep up with the pace he set. People still tell me that it was great fun, really educational and a wonderful insight into the possibilities of music. I’m not sure about that, but it was a thrill a minute, like being on a wall of death motorbike ride at an old fairground. Afterwards Andy and me carried the conversation on in the green room for another few hours. It turned out we had a lot in common. We were roughly the same age, both born in 1959, me in September, him in November. We both remembered Chris Bonnington climbing ‘The Old Man of Hoy’ on a live BBC TV broadcast in 1967, we had vivid memories about the moon landing and we had both queued for tickets to see Bob Dylan on his 1978 British tour and been changed by hearing him play live, him at Earls Court, me at Blackbushe. We both loved Sterns African record shop in London and shared a passion for the recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins. We also shared a similar sense of humour, a fondness for old music hall songs and jokes, an appreciation for the downright bizarre and we liked smoking, we smoked like kipper house chimneys.

A week or two after Musicport, Andy told me that his publisher had organised a British tour, thirty odd nights in theatres and large art centres. He wanted to read from his book, but the interview with me had given him an idea. How would I like to join him as his ‘inquisitor’ as he put it. I said ‘You don’t need somebody to interview you, just do it yourself.’ He said ‘But I don’t know when to stop and you know how to interject and rein me in!’ In the end I agreed.

We set off the tour on a bitterly cold night in Penzance in January 2012. The interview followed much the same template as the one at Musicport. I asked a few questions. Andy spun stories about being an eye witness to much of the social history of the late twentieth/early twenty first century. The time he was ambushed in Rwanda and followed lorry tyre tracks on a dirt road to avoid stepping on a landmines, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, threatening to punch Simon Bates in the face in a BBC studio after he had maligned the coal miners during the strike, a run in with the Ton Ton Macoute in Haiti, an introduction to the man ‘who knows everything’ in a library in North Korea. One fantastic story tumbling out after another and all spiced and punctuated with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music from blues, to folk to soul and of course global sounds. And he had the best playlist you ever heard, an edited one for the theatres and a longer one for the car, Neil Young, who he modelled his dress sense on, Joni Mitchell, I can’t hear Carrie get out your cane, without thinking of Andy and the soul singer James Carr, Warren Zevon, Alpha Blondy and on it goes…

On the night in Penzance, I also got a clear insight into why Andy’s book was called ‘No off Switch’ (as if I needed one). The show ran over by at least an hour, we then sat around drinking little bottles of Belgian beer Andy had stuffed into a suitcase and then at midnight he wanted to go for a curry. I don’t know we found an open curry house in Penzance at that time in the winter months, but we did. Then he wanted to drink some more beer and as we turned in for the night, he said, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot, we need to be up at 5, because I’ve got a live radio spot in Plymouth at 8.’ And so it went, like that for the next few weeks, in Dartmouth, Bristol, Oxford, Derby, Barnsley and no sleep until Goole. I asked him in an unguarded moment, ‘Do you ever sleep.’ He looked at me as though I had gone daft, ‘Nah, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ I was a bit relieved when the tour had to be cut short before the end, because Andy ran out of books to sell.

I look back now though and remember it with a lot of affection, because amongst all of the lack of sleep, the hundred mile an hour performance and the surreal storytelling about international events that none of us, except Andy get to experience, I did get close to him and we became good friends. Occasionally on stage and certainly in the back of the tour car, Andy told me beautiful stories about more personal things he had done, about how had had taken Biggie Tembo the leader of his heroes The Bhundu Boys, to meet his gran one Christmas and how he’d mused on butterflies landing on piles of discarded clothes on a roadside during the Rwandan genocide.

And when boredom set in during motorway miles, I got Andy to remember the names of the songs that had been sung to him by a choir of singing waitresses in Pyongyang. I’d have to put my thinking cap on to recall more, but ‘Peace on the end of my bayonet’ was one, ‘The love in my trench’ was another. Great fun, so much so, that towards the end of the tour we were performing the names of these songs as a kind of dada poem. The never-ending possibilities of music as Andy said.

We have stayed in touch, not in each other’s pockets, but to wish each other Happy Birthday and doing the odd appearance together, to talk about, well Bob Dylan and all that other bullshit. We also had a running joke about Belarus. Andy was the most well-travelled man I ever met, but was always impressed that I’d managed to make a film in Belarus and stayed in a hotel in Minsk with Belarussian Olympic athletes.

I need to let this sad news about Andy settle. I may write more as we go along. For now, sleep well old lad. X.
Photo of Andy and me by Al Wilkinson on another visit to Musicport 2017.

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

@LizKershawDJ I'm very sorry Liz.

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

@LalayLottie Happy birthday Lottie x

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

Sir Keith Park 34053 at the Spa Valley Railway https://t.co/A2IqJz0V4X via @YouTube

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

Mayflower 61306 Leaving London Paddington - Twice! 21/8/25 https://t.co/iULWbgiRQq via @YouTube

[Dr Jenny Thatcher @JennyAThatcher]

Of all the things I've written (so far) about my time in academia, this one got me the most hate mail, particularly from anonymous accounts 😃

The Little Servant Girl: Being a Working-Class Woman in Academia https://t.co/giLOleLTXB

[Stephen Brown @stephenb1969]

Sian and Katie at the Kirklees Light Railway https://t.co/C5IhGHH89S via @YouTube