FEATURE:
It’s Been a Week!
an early birthday gift/mention – for he was born on 14th June, 1972 -, instead, this is s celebration and salute of one of our finest broadcasters. Everyone knows how much I love Shaun Keaveny. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram. I have been a fan and devotee since his BBC Radio 6 Music days. I think I tuned into his shows from 2014 or there abouts. He left the station a few years back and, at the time, it was a big shock. Not his decision at all, it was a huge mistake for a station that let go one of their biggest talents. Where would he go from there?! It was a devastating loss for the listeners. Since then, Keaveny has become one of the busiest and most eclectic broadcasters in the country. I want to come to some interviews that were published post-BBC Radio 6 Music. I shall do some admin now. It’s been a little while since I wrote a feature about Shaun Keaveny. Since then, he has done so much! In addition to standing in for Liza Tarbuck on her BBC Radio 2 Saturday slot, he has stepped in to host The Folk Show (Mark Radcliffe is taking some time off and will be back on BBC Radio 2 and 6 Music soon). He has also presented on Greatest Hits Radio, BBC Radio London, appeared numerous time on BBC Radio 4. I shall come to his current podcast, Your Place or Mine with Shaun Keaveny, soon enough. In terms of podcast appearances, there have been a fair few – mostly music-themed, Keaveny has chatted about The Beatles and beyond. His other podcast, The Line-Up with Shaun Keaveny, might be on a fallow year. The latest episode was in July 2023. It is a series where guests chooser their fantasy festival line-up. Simon Pegg is the latest guest. I do hope that it comes back very soon!
One can forgive Keaveny for not having enough time to keep things like that going. Although I do not know the circumstances, many of us hope that this podcast will be back soon. You can traverse and dig deep for podcast episodes on Spotify. A recent one with Russell Howard for his Wonderbox series is well worth a listen. Shaun Keaveny presents on Community Garden Radio. A listener-run station, it is this independent and wonderful station that broadcasts out of Fitzrovia. It started not long after Keaveny departed BBC Radio 6 Music. In addition, we have the wonderful podcast, Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind. Also – and where does he find the time and energy?! – there is Your Place or Mine with Shaun Keaveny. Hosted alongside comedian/geographer/historian Iszi Lawrence, it is a show where guests try to convince Keaveny to get off his sofa and visit their favourite location.
Everywhere from New York (Guy Garvey) and The International Space Station (Tim Peake) has been discussed. It is a funny and fascinating series that I hope runs for many more series. I wonder now, nearly three years after he left BBC Radio 6 Music, Shaun Keaveny feels about his career. Would he have thought he would do so much in this relatively short period?! Spanning multiple stations and shows, it has been amazing and right that he has enjoyed this success and opportunities. I hope that Keaveny gets to step in for Liza Tarbuck again soon, as he is great on BBC Radio 2 (I also forgot to mention that he stepped in for Johnnie Walker and The Rock Show). I am going to round off pretty soon. I am interested looking back at some of the interviews that came after the BBC Radio 6 Music departure and the then-new Community Garden Radio.
I think that the next few years will be as busy and exciting for Shaun Keavney. Close to his fifty-second birthday, he might feel the need to slow down a bit and work fewer days. His daily podcast for Radio X means that this might be a bit tricky! In 2023, Big Issue spoke with Shaun Keaveny. From a huge digital radio station to presenting on a smaller, community-led station, it was a transition. Rather than a step down, this pioneering move was actually one that allowed for greater freedom. Not restricted in terms of playlist, what he could say and how the show would run. A revolution that will surely see the growth of this type of radio station:
“The Big Issue: How did The Line-Up come about?
Shaun Keaveny: It was conceived of in the deepest, darkest depths of lockdown. It was born of that deep-seated sadness that a lot of us music fans carried around that time.
Obviously, since then, we’ve gone back to the fields in earnest, but we’ve got all kinds of other horrendous challenges around us. So, it’s just a great escape to get in a room with one of my favourite people. We are ostensibly talking about music and their favourite acts… and about 20 per cent of the discussions have been about that. The rest is an outpouring of either complete trivia, or we go incredibly, deeply emotional. Because that’s what music does, isn’t it? It takes us to those emotional places.
It’s like if you have a chat with somebody in the car, more seems to come out sometimes because the pressure’s off. You’re looking out the window, so your mind drifts off, and then you are talking about things you weren’t expecting to talk about.
I think the genius of Roy Plomley coming up with Desert Island Discs was exactly that. You can say: “why did you choose this song?” Which is an incredibly basic interview question. But then the next question can be: “so it reminds you of your mum when she died…?” And then all of a sudden, you’re in much deeper water.
What are the advantages of doing it yourself versus your old job at 6 Music?
I’m a broadcaster. That’s the way I see it. I just love putting headphones on and hearing my voice. I do a thing called Community Garden Radio, which is like a Patreon radio show, every Friday. And that’s about the most free I’ve ever felt speaking into a microphone. We’ve built our own tiny little radio station and we broadcast to our little cabal of superfans. We can do whatever we want. We can play whatever music we want. I can write the most outlandish sketches and deliver them or swear, which is puerile but freeing. It’s like how I imagine Howard Stern must’ve felt in 1989. The freedom before certain strictures came in is very, very intoxicating. I love that.
I always hanker to go back to live radio, out there to the nation. And I’m actually doing it in January. I’m standing in for one of the biggest legends ever in radio, Johnny Walker, doing his rock show radio for four weeks. That’s the ultimate adrenaline thrill for me. One day in the future, I would love to get back to doing that on a daily basis.
Can you be more political when you’re not on staff at the BBC?
Yes. That’s one of the payoffs that you have to consider when you take a job like that. You can’t go around espousing your niche political view when you’re doing a breakfast show for a big corporation.
One of the great pleasures of the last year or so for me, has been the freedom of being able to speak my mind. I don’t for one minute think that it makes any difference. But it doesn’t matter, as a citizen, I really enjoy doing it. There are so many things that I feel really passionate about. And I feel like sometimes I want to say that.
Having said that, discourse is virtually non-existent. It is a binfire of the vanities: everybody thinking that what they say is more important everybody else. I’m hoping that we are slowly moving to a better place with all that, but at the moment it’s like we’re at the bottom of the barrel, aren’t we? We couldn’t really get much worse than it is at the moment. But then we’ve been saying that for the last five years.
You’re often compared to my one of my great heroes, Terry Wogan. Do you think he would be doing podcasts if he was still with us?
It’s such a kind thing to be put in the same paragraph as Terry. He took me under his wing when I started on the breakfast show at 6. He used to regularly come down and feed us carbohydrates. He was the ultimate human hug and the world just needs so much more of that.
I guess he probably would have ended up doing a podcast on BBC Sounds and it would have been bloody brilliant. But he was a curious mix, Terry. He was he was a hard-working guy. But he was a smart-working guy. He just used to look at everything as, what’s the path of least resistance to get this job done really well? All the stories are true about how he got so good at being on the radio that he would just turn up with about nine minutes to go. His producer would just hand him a colossal pile of emails, he’d sit there with a big cup of coffee, start going through and away you go – that’s your show. That’s where you want to get to in life. Then you go home see your wife, see your kids, learn to play golf.
You’ve said before that you were confused about why the BBC let you go from your 6 Music show. Has it become clearer with time?
Everything becomes clearer in time. It causes you a certain amount of grief when a big change happens to you. And then you give it a year, and you go, “Oh yeah, I should have seen that coming a mile off. It’s fine. Look at where we are now.” So I’m utterly sanguine about it. No hard feelings. The BBC gave me something unbelievable. They gave me a 14-year stretch in one of the hottest slots that you can imagine in the world of radio. There are no better places to work. So, how can you look back on that with any bitterness? I simply don’t. I feel it was a gift, and it’s still giving to me, so I’m pretty bloody lucky”.
There is one more Big Issue interview I want to bring in. They spoke to Shaun Keaveny again in October of last year. Whilst the idea of a daily podcast might have seemed achievable, putting it into action must have been a bit daunting and scary. Months on from its launch and it is this hugely successful daily relief. Something that has already accrued a lot of listeners:
“The Big Issue: I’m sorry but the first thing I have to ask is… a daily podcast – are you mad?
Shaun Keaveny: Oh, my God. I knew somebody was going to point this out. I’ve just started absolutely canning it myself. To be perfectly honest, the only way that this is going to work, is that I’m gifting the first part of every day to the gods of content. So everything that happens almost from when I wearily blinked my eyes open to about two o’clock in the afternoon: it’s all fair game. I’ve got to try and harvest as much stuff as I can in that time.
I just listened to your pilot episode, in which you realised it would take two weeks to do each edition of Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind…
That was a moment, I had a real dark night of the soul. I’ve been very temperate for quite a long time but I made a terrible mistake of going out for a few drinks the Friday before last. I got the beer fear on the Saturday morning. I was in a freefall panic, bolt upright at 6.50am. I just sort of sat at the laptop trying to bang out contingency plans or fake my own death. But you know, between myself and my genius producer Ben and the goodwill of the whatever audience we’ve got, I’m confident that we are going to create something at least mildly diverting.
You started by rummaging through some literal rubbish.
Ages ago, when I was at 6 [Music], I was talking to my good friend and producers there, trying to come up with ideas for the afternoon show. We had all kinds of daft ideas, none of which we brought to fruition. I have written down on a piece of paper – and I don’t think I was joking, either – Dry Stone Walling with Shaun Keaveny. Because, number one, I like being in nature; number two, I love dry stone walls. The other idea, slightly more seriously, was I think people chat better when they’re already doing something. When you’re doing something mundane, you feel a bit less under the microscope.
But what the litter-picking was all really about – I bought these litter picking devices two years ago on Amazon, I hadn’t used them. I thought, wait a minute, this is a golden opportunity here to use these. Who doesn’t like walking up and down the canal?
And you’re making the canal a bit nicer for everybody else.
I mean, we got a full bin bag in 40 minutes. It is only a tiny contribution to the planet’s woes, but it made me feel a little bit better.
Talking about feeling a little bit better, you have promised to delve into the papers, which strikes me as not a brilliant way to feel better.
The news cycle now is so unbelievably sad and terrifying, with so much unimaginable human suffering going on all around, I personally find it very difficult to get through that.
The only thing that I have got in my armoury is to try and use my one slight talent, which is to give people something else to think about for a little bit. It’s not to say this stuff isn’t happening, or we should ignore it. It’s just a little oasis of silliness for a little while for us to catch our breath.
And so, it’s gonna be hard but we’re going to be picking out the real ‘and finally’ parts of the news that we can have a little bit of fun with. Those are the ones that we’re going to be using… with hilarious consequences, or at least mildly diverting consequences.
What is making you angry at the moment?
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I didn’t have an axe to grind – because I do. Where I come from, just about everybody that I know and love are of a very similar socio-political persuasion. We believe in social justice. We believe in helping people, rather than ignoring people who are in need.
We’ve been presided over for such a long time by people who seem to have normalised – they’ve almost made an artform out of blaming other people for shit. There’s a callousness and a cruelty to discourse in modern politics that makes me want to cry. It’s a difficult time for humans to be alive and to be trying to make sense of the world, because there’s so much info and a lot of it’s not particularly good for your mental health.
That’s one of the reasons why I’m trying to be a little bit more meditative. What can I do in the world that might make me feel a little bit better and a bit more connected to the human race?
In a time of callousness, there’s something rebellious in connecting with people.
I think that’s right. And I think that’s what Big Issue does. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky to understand that what the big money, the big corporations, are interested in is atomising us and making us a little bit more frightened of each other, so they can make capital out of that fear and competition. What people like The Big Issue do so beautifully, is say: no, that’s not what we’re about. We’re about bringing people together.
You know, I’m being very, very highfalutin about a stupid daily podcast that might kill me. But if there’s any kind of ethos behind it, it is that.
We talked about politics there. A lot of people are saying we’re about to see the back of this government we’ve had for a long time. Would it be better if we didn’t have them and maybe had the other lot in for a while?
I honestly do think all you can really do is look at the facts. Look at the record, look at the things that have been enacted, the beliefs that have been inculcated over the last 13 years and draw your own conclusions. It’s easy for governments to say, we’ve had this financial crash and we’ve had Covid. Yeah, there have been unbelievable challenges.
But some of the some of the moral choices that have been made over the past few years, in our name, have sat very uncomfortably for me. And I just think, to be as apolitical about it as possible, just to look at it almost as a matter of physics… sometimes it’s just better to have a change and let somebody else have a go and hope there might be a change.
Maybe we’re not done with kindness yet. Maybe that’s not an outdated concept. Maybe it’s something that we actually really need. I’d love to see that implanted back into society a little bit.
What are you most looking forward to about Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind?
I’m really interested to explore what it’s like to connect our audience. It’s one of the slightly less obvious attributes of podcasts. A lot of the time they don’t use audience, it can very often be a one-way process. Whereas we’re really trying to get the audience involved. So I hope that works. But also just being out of the studio, whether it’s recording a chat with some huge star in a pub for our tax deductible pop quiz… I’m imagining Bob Dylan in the local beer and burger, you know?”.
In October 2023, writing for GQ, Jessie Atkinson spoke with one of her broadcasting heroes, Shaun Keaveny. Speaking about The Daily Grind, it was another new chapter and big move for a legend of radio. Someone who has in some ways moved from being a broadcast great to this podcast king, it will be wonderful seeing where he goes from here:
“And now the presenter is returning to daily broadcasting, albeit in a podcast format. Created from a dedicated studio with Global Radio in the mornings and dropping every afternoon, Daily Grind will be, as Shaun himself describes, a “distilled essential oil of Keaveny”. That is to say that there will be no music, but there will be interviews, listener missives and plenty of the cosy, deadpan humour that made Keaveny one the BBC’s most popular — and cosiest — broadcasters. As he sits “heart in his mouth” at the dawn of his return, we asked Shaun how he’s feeling about it all.
How are you?
I’m currently in the womb of the Daily Grind studio and I’m waiting for the first one to go out. I’m bloody nervous actually.
Daily Grind, like your former BBC Radio 6 show, is all about celebrating the mundane moments in life. What do you think the value in that is?
It goes without saying that the news cycle gets more upsetting everyday, and we don’t want to pretend stuff like that’s not happening, but we do want to look at smaller aspects of life and try and bring some pleasure out of them. It’s this lower stakes business that we’re interested in the most..
What are the pedestrian minutiae of your mornings?
I’ve got a load of kids to get out of the house, so I’ve got to get the dependents out of the way first before I can concentrate on anything else. Our youngest, she has a little owl alarm that lights up, so the first thing I always hear is her flutey little four year-old voice saying: “My owl’s awake, daddy.” The central crank of my getting out of the house and making it a good day is making stovetop coffee. And then I’m going to come to the studio…
What’s it like?
It’s a proper place. My only stipulation was the light had to be quite low. Not off but really toasty and moody like an elderly gentleman’s front room.
No big lights!
People think I’m mad at home; I go around flicking all the big lights off. I understand you need them in an operating theatre — you can’t have smoky lamplight when you’re having a heart bypass — but the rest of the time when you’re just sitting around having a glass of wine you’ve got to turn them off.
Do you have any middle-aged shout outs?
My life is just one long middle-aged shout out. The most obvious recent example is that almost overnight, my eyesight went shitter. The next step for me, I think, is to make the writing bigger on my iPhone. Then I’ll be in the pantheon of late middle-age.
How are you preparing for daily recording again?
I’m not good at giving up things that are bad for me. I’m not Slash in 1993 or anything, but I do like to nip out for a couple of pints here and there. Burn the candle at both ends. Stay up watching music documentaries when I should be in bed. All of that wild and crazy stuff. But in recent times, I’ve been trying to save up my energy a bit because I can instinctually tell that the next few weeks and months are going to be an onslaught.
What will you be drinking while recording?
I’ve got to be careful that I mitigate and limit the amount of caffeine that I drink because otherwise it could be very destructive to my career. But the problem is that I’ve got no willpower at all and the other problem is that there’s a decent coffee machine next door with the Clooney-style pods.
What music have you been listening to lately?
On Community Garden Radio I choose an hour’s worth of music. We just played a fantastic young artist called Lola Young. Glass Beams are really good, and the new Stones album is bloody good, too. People like Young Fathers blew me away at Glastonbury. CMAT: she’s absolutely fantastic as well”.
Rather than this being purely a birthday-timed feature about Shaun Keaveny, it is another chance to show just how incredible his career is. One of the hardest-working people in broadcasting, he spans podcasts on BBC radio to Community Garden Radio. Wonderful podcasts and opportunities covering on various programmes and stations. It is so well-earned and incredible seeing Shaun Keaveny go from strength to strength. Although sometimes exhausting, it is a new career rise and renaissance. All of his fans and listeners hope…
LONG may it continue!