Shaun Keaveny is broadcasting to a couple of thousand people from a forgotten back room in a shabby Soho office that’s all glass and no insulation. The ambience is more knackered 1970s comp than radio studio.
“If I was me 18 months ago looking at what I’m doing now, I’d be thinking, ‘Ah, that’s a shame, isn’t it? He used to have this massive platform and now look at what he’s doing,’” says Keaveny who, until September last year, was used to six-figure audiences and the BBC Radio 6 Music studios where things, you know, worked.
“It’s taken me ages to get my head round, but when you drill down into what we’re doing here it’s phenomenal,” he says. And what he’s doing is of interest because it may possibly be the future of radio in the same way that YouTube was once the future (now the present) of video: a live, independent radio show broadcast via Patreon, the digital platform that lets supporters subscribe to projects and give creators a steady income. In this case, £4 a month to access Shaun Keaveny’s Creative Cul de Sac, a weekly Friday radio show, a podcast and daily written and recorded missives.
It adds up to quite a lot of Keaveny (“To be honest, I’m knackered, I took on a lot when I left 6 Music because I thought half of it was going to fail. But things started working straight away.”)
But before we get to the future, we have to deal with the past, and the reason why the 49-year-old has been forced into DIY radio rather than remaining a beloved 6 Music presence. In June last year, after a 14-year run, first on breakfast and then afternoons, he announced he was leaving. “Things change, places change, people change and it’s time for a change,” he said at the time.
But his listeners didn’t buy it. Keaveny had become an essential part of 6 Music and their lives with his smart, funny and warm approach, but now he was leaving? Something else had to be going on, surely. Was it ageism? Had he refused to move and work in Manchester? Was there a secret beef? Questions were even asked in that modern-day version of parliament, Mumsnet: “Is anyone else gutted that Shaun Keaveny is leaving 6 Radio?” asked one thread (they were).
The BBC was forced into a statement, which clarified nothing: “Shaun is a much-loved presenter on 6 Music and we respect his decision to leave the station. We wish him the best of luck for the future, of course.”
So, what happened? He closes his eyes and thinks for a moment. When he speaks, his eyes stay closed, as if he’s been holding it in for a little too long and is glad to get it out, but wants to be fair to all concerned: “There’s still some mystery surrounding what happened – for me as well as for everybody else. That’s relatively common in radio and TV. I’ve had so many conversations with other broadcasters who say, ‘Well, I’ll tell you my story.’”
So you didn’t feel you knew what was happening?
“In reality there are few bosses who will tell you the full story – and neither do they have to. They just have to say, ‘We’ve had a look, we’ve had a think and it’s going to be different and you’re not going to be part of the picture,’ and I guess that was the top and bottom of it.”
After he was told his show was ending, he was offered what he considered to be “much lesser” opportunities, so although it was his decision to go, it was a forced one. “But I honestly can say that it’s been a huge liberation. Over the past three or four years there were a lot of times in my professional life where I felt dissatisfied with the bureaucracy.”
But I get that sense he would still stick up for the institution. “Too bloody right! One of the great things about leaving the Beeb is that you become free to defend it in a way that you could never do when you were working for it, and I think that people would notice that I have vociferously done that. Let me be dead straight on this: I owe them my entire livelihood and I’ll never be ungrateful for that.
“But, at the same time, you’re always one link away from a phone call from somebody higher up saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ But, despite all its massive drawbacks, I’d still much rather that bureaucracy be there than be removed and replaced by something Nadine-fucking-Dorries thinks is a good idea. But it’s also just a joy to be free because the price of working there is that you’re thwarted a lot. Whereas now we just do what we want.”
Initially, his intention was to do a podcast – “There are arguably too many podcasts out there, but if anybody has earned the right to do one after 20 years of broadcasting, it’s me” – but that rapidly became two podcasts: The Creative Cul de Sac, in which he talks to other creative types about abandoned projects languishing in their notebooks, and The Line-Up, where celebrities discuss their ideal festival line-up. Both have legs, but the live radio show – almost an afterthought – has rapidly blossomed into the main gig.
It seems an obvious idea now – take what you’re good at and replicate it on your own terms, become your own broadcaster – but it took a while to hatch. He started working with a friend, Clive Tulloh, from whose production company offices he broadcasts. Tulloh’s son Ben – a fan – came on board and they began recording podcasts.
“Then, just before Christmas, Ben said to me, ‘You know we have this tech that means you can do live radio through Patreon. We can do it from your spare room’.”
Which is literally what they did.
At first everything was seat-of-the-pants because there was no blueprint, no technical back-up. Added to that, Covid restrictions meant Ben produced the first show from his car – although there was no mobile reception outside Keaveny’s house so he had to drive to neighbouring borough Neasden to get a signal (something about this is so very Keaveny: enthusiasm thwarted by the mundanities of everyday life).
Still, “It was like magic,” says Keaveny, “I played Ain’t Good Enough for You by Bruce Springsteen, one of my trigger tracks anyway; I just started having a little cry. I was in our spare room alone and Ben was in his car texting, ‘Put fader three up.’ I was doing what I had always done and it felt like coming home. It’s funny to watch something that we thought would just be a little teaser, a side dish for the main of the podcasts, become the main focus very quickly.”
The reason it took off so swiftly was because of something it’s easy to forget about in discussions of platforms and digital disruption: the listeners. And they have rallied to him in their thousands. Nothing compared to the number he enjoyed at the BBC, but these are the ultras: loyal, engaged and paying.
During breaks in the show, he scans through their emails, chuckling delightedly: “They get it. They just bloody get it,” like he’s amazed that anyone connects with what he does. But they do and many of them have been with him since the beginning when he arrived at the nascent 6 Music from nights on that great radio incubator, London’s Xfm. He came via stints at Reading 210 FM (where he started out writing ad copy in 1997, moving from hometown Leigh in Greater Manchester after a friend-of-a-friend put him up for the job) and Wolverhampton’s Beacon FM, taking on Phill Jupitus’s seat on the breakfast show in 2006.
He landed at the right time. Digital radio was taking off (6 Music is digital-only) and offering something new in a landscape where shows seemed stuck in wearily familiar formats: a studio crammed full of braying sidekicks yucking it up with a superstar presenter; the gratingly chummy host, playing it as if they’d just got in from a night on the lash with famous mates; or the DJ slinging the sanitised, endlessly repeating playlist.
Keaveny, though, didn’t do fake banter or pointless pop. He was just himself: sometimes weary, a touch melancholic, often childish, but always smart and intimate and – most importantly – self- deprecating, which the listeners bought into eagerly. So much so that, over the years, their emails have taken on the tone of a Hollywood Roast: “Keep up the work,” or “Very whelming this morning,” are favourite sign-offs.
He’s aware, though, that he can come across to the casual listener as dour: “People, if they have a glancing experience of me, say: ‘Ooh, isn’t he miserable?’ It’s simply not true. I’m a big lover of life. I see it for what it is, though, I also see the brevity of it, and I’m 50 this year so I’m not going to waste whatever working years I’ve got left. I work my nuts off on this because, if I’m not going to be with my kids, I’m going to do something that’s authentic.” And it’s that authenticity which his audience responds to. It’s why he is able to broadcast from the back room of a dilapidated office, balancing a laptop in each hand like a waiter, while occasionally rolling his chair over the power cable and cutting himself off air, and still attract listeners.
I put out a message to his Patreons, asking them to sum up why they’ve followed him down this experimental rabbit hole. The answers come back swiftly.
“Listening always feels like a hug to me.”
“Warmth, depth and funny as f. It’s like spending time with a good mate, he helped me through lockdown TBH.”
“He is fallible and sincere (perhaps too much so for some at the BBC?) It’s a community, not an audience and Shaun sets himself as a member (Sid James laugh), not a leader.”
The day he left the BBC Johnny Marr pitched up on air to pay tribute, while Ken Bruce, who helms the UK’s most listened-to radio show on Radio 2 tweeted: “A unique broadcaster and a top bloke. Your next adventure awaits!” while Zoë Ball called him “a don of the airwaves”.
The way Keaveny’s listeners react, the way they’re in on the act reminds me of someone else: Terry Wogan, with his Togs, the gags that ran for years, and the cocoon he wove around himself and his audience. I suggest he could be seen as a kind of Wogan for Generation X.
“Wow!” he chews on the idea for a long moment, “Terry was – and is – my lodestone. When I started breakfast, he was still there. He anointed me, was very kind.”
Kind in what way? “What he brought out in me was this idea that, OK you’re not going to write a novel, OK you might never record an album as good as What’s Going On, but you’re a broadcaster, and be comfortable with that. And if you get really good at it and you do it for long enough, you might get the chance to touch people.
“More than anybody – with the exception of maybe Danny Baker – he showed me that, if you think it’s just a radio show, you’re wrong. It becomes a community and that’s a really important part of people’s lives and it remains for years.”
It’s a theme he picked up on during his final 6 Music broadcast, speaking about how something as ephemeral and easily dismissed as a radio show can have emotional and cultural heft. “All the way through those years at 6, I was in all sorts of emotional turmoil because, if you’re a novelist or musician, then it’s, ‘Mummy’s writing a novel, so leave her alone because this is serious.’ Whereas what we do, we’re down here with DLT dickin’ around and killing three hours on the radio.
“I became like a character – the creatively thwarted man. The character me was comfy with the idea that these big names would come in as guests and I’d want to be like them, but I can’t be.”
But, over time, he’s begun to accept that radio is his medium and that through it he might just have ended up producing his own equivalent of that novel – a feeling underlined by the outpouring of love from listeners and colleagues at the end of his 6 Music tenure: “I now realise – it’s gone from head to heart and it’s sunk in – that we’ve created this incredibly beautiful thing. That’s the great joy of our kind of shows – like a Danny Baker or a Greg James or a Liza Tarbuck or a Trevor Nelson – you build an environment, you build repetition, you build jokes and everybody understands them and it’s a fantastic community.
“There were lots of people who loved what we did at 6. It might sound disingenuous – like I’m a bread-head who wants to get as many Patreons as possible so I can buy a gold toilet, but that’s not the case – but if this stayed exactly as it is now, that would be great. It would be so lovely and beautiful and a manageable part of my life. But if there are more who want to be part of it, I don’t know where we can go; we talked about making our own radio station. I don’t see why that’s not possible.”
Listen live on Fridays at patreon.com/shaunkeaveny, the Line Up and Shaun Keaveny’s Creative Cul de Sac are available wherever you get your podcasts
