Nigel Kennedy: 'Antagonism vibes me up'

Sneered at in the Eighties, Nigel Kennedy stuck to his guns. Now artistic director of the Polish Chamber Orchestra, he is scathing about the British music industry, says Sholto Byrnes

A summer evening at Hampton Court. In one of the grand quadrangles, an audience is growing mildly restive. Members of the Polish Chamber Orchestra have been flitting on and off stage for 10 minutes, but of their artistic director there is no sign. Eventually, a cheer goes up as the shortish, tufty-haired man we are waiting for enters through the crowd, grinning and clenching his fist to his chest in a gesture of matey salutation. After some raucous chanting backstage, Nigel Kennedy leads his orchestra out for a performance the like of which I have never seen. It is a performance that critics would almost certainly rip apart; but it is also one that could inspire the novice to pick up a violin and practise night and day to capture just some of the magic that Kennedy brings to his art, even though he sometimes seems to treat that art as casually as the Palestinian scarf that, knotted loosely round his waist, struggles to restrain his belly and keep his trousers up.

A summer evening at Hampton Court. In one of the grand quadrangles, an audience is growing mildly restive. Members of the Polish Chamber Orchestra have been flitting on and off stage for 10 minutes, but of their artistic director there is no sign. Eventually, a cheer goes up as the shortish, tufty-haired man we are waiting for enters through the crowd, grinning and clenching his fist to his chest in a gesture of matey salutation. After some raucous chanting backstage, Nigel Kennedy leads his orchestra out for a performance the like of which I have never seen. It is a performance that critics would almost certainly rip apart; but it is also one that could inspire the novice to pick up a violin and practise night and day to capture just some of the magic that Kennedy brings to his art, even though he sometimes seems to treat that art as casually as the Palestinian scarf that, knotted loosely round his waist, struggles to restrain his belly and keep his trousers up.

It's not that Kennedy doesn't take the show seriously. The eight Vivaldi concertos, including The Four Seasons, exude a freshness that scarcely seems possible in such overfamiliar works. The moment Kennedy indicates the beat with two swift movements of his arm, all concentration is on the music, characterised, at his instruction, by ultra-strict tempos and dynamic contrasts as sharp as weather fronts. It's just the bits in between that are rather unusual. "What's your name, darlin'?" the maestro asks a woman near the front. "Linda? That's always been my favourite name. This concerto's for you, Linda." Before each item on the programme, Kennedy takes a comic turn, reading out the opus's cumbersome serial number and making much of the fact that the orchestration includes "optional lute" - "That's him at the back." When he plays solo Bach at the beginning, we are told it is "some shit I normally do as an encore".

The Polish Chamber Orchestra seem delighted by their director's antics. At one point in a triple concerto for two violins and cello, the leader of the second violins, a distinguished-looking man of advanced years whom Kennedy has nicknamed "Sherlock", gets up to adjust a peg holding the music of one of the soloists. As he retreats, he pauses; he then jives creakily in time to the Baroque beat for a few seconds, before sitting down again.

It's almost as though he and the orchestra are having too much fun, I say to Kennedy when we meet. "We've established this kind of rapport where we can have a laugh but also make some serious progress with the music itself," he replies. "If everyone's too uptight, it can stop the musicians really listening to each other."

"Uptight", of course, is not a word readily associated with Kennedy, who explains that he began his directorship of the Polish Chamber Orchestra two years ago after working with the Berlin Philharmonic, which is, he tells me, "a phenomenal motherfucker orchestra". The child prodigy who was taken under the wing of the late Yehudi Menuhin, studying at the great violinist's school from the age of seven, grew up to be the bad boy of classical music in the 1980s. He stunned audiences with his renditions of the Elgar Violin Concerto (and sold a phenomenal two million copies of his 1989 recording of The Four Seasons) and infuriated the conservative classical-music establishment with his eccentric dress sense and studiedly sloppy enunciation.

In the Nineties, he took a few years off from classical performing, investigating the music of Jimi Hendrix, composing his own work and returning to one of his early passions, jazz. He is now based in Cracow, and his life with his Polish second wife, Agnieszka, sounds calmer. The father of Sark, an eight-year-old boy from a previous relationship, Kennedy is 47. The years of seriously hard partying (he was once arrested in Hungary after crashing into the Romanian border, relieving himself on Romanian soil and then finding himself surrounded by armed soldiers) have given him a similar face to Gordon Ramsay - the features are full but deeply lined, as though etched into a plastic mould. Calmer, perhaps, but not complacent, as asking for his views on the state of classical music today reveals.

"What's happened in classical music is the same as what happened with the teen bands," he says, "with all the make-a-pop star-on-telly shit. It seems that it's so much better if the band sounds like the last band, instead of a band making new shit. How Frank Zappa or Marvin Gaye would fare on these new shows I dread to think - they'd probably be dumped on the first possible occasion. It's the same with classical: the recording of it is about searching for a technical perfection that doesn't disturb the listener. That can influence performers away from looking for something new. So the climate is getting more and more difficult for people to do enterprising things in recording. New artists can only break their way through by the circus trick of winning a competition or something. In the old days, they could get a 70-year-old into the studio because he had something new to say about Chopin. But even Rubinstein or Glenn Gould would find difficulty now in being allowed to record what they wanted."

Much has been written in the past about Kennedy's supposed inarticulacy. Apart from his habit of sprinkling his conversation with demotic words he certainly didn't pick up from Menuhin (one cannot imagine Lord M commending his young charge on a "monster" recital), he expresses himself fluently and passionately. If the image may once have been deliberately chosen, it is part of the Kennedy fabric now. And if it comes across as genuine, that is because, as he admits, he feels that "a bit of antagonism actually vibes you up". It is in his nature to kick against dominant norms. "Sometimes what I do seems a little extreme, but really it's only to try to balance the scales. If I hear someone preach very right-wing stuff, I'd probably come out with views far further to the left than I ever really believed. And if someone preaches to the left, I'd probably sneak in some Tory fascism. I could have had a very smooth, Arts-Council-funded life: it was all there. I just went the other way."

Some of that stems from his childhood. His father, an alcoholic cellist, left the family; then, at a young age, he was sent to board, which left him feeling disconnected from his mother. Did that lead Kennedy to look for father figures, such as Menuhin and the late conductor Klaus Tennstedt, with whom he had a close musical relationship? "I learnt to be very self-dependent and independent from quite a young age," he says, "and to expect nothing from anybody. To do things myself, that's what I learnt from not having a dad and going to boarding school. Father figures, maybe not, but someone I can rely on..." An uncle figure? "Yes. In music, you share values like you're in a family. And Klaus, being that much older, was like that for me."

Dismissed by some as an amiable buffoon, Kennedy is canny and candid about the advantages of infamy. When I ask him about his former personal assistant Emma Jones, who sold a lurid tale of working for him to a Sunday paper, he seems fairly unbothered. "I had a record release at that time, so it didn't do too much harm to have a two-page spread."

Now he's older, is the great rebel in danger of becoming part of the establishment himself? Kennedy looks truly puzzled. What about a knighthood? "I'd never accept a knighthood, because the Queen knows nothing about music, man. How can she say I'm good or bad?"