Nigel Kennedy is munching biscuits and swigging tea from his Aston Villa mug. It's 10.30am: practically the crack of dawn, given that he was up necking plum vodka — 'My wife made it. I drink it. Teamwork!' he cries — until the early hours.
The virtuoso violinist is wearing one of Villa's vintage 'away' strips: 'Horrible, tasteless neon green and lurid red. I love it!' he chortles.
His allegiance to the Birmingham football club he has supported since boyhood is as ingrained as his commitment to making classical music accessible to everyone, not just an elite minority of 'condescending wannabe gentry', as he puts it.
Since his 1989 recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons sold more than three million copies, making it the best-selling classical recording ever, he has been resolutely defying convention. And today, as he publishes Nigel Kennedy Uncensored!, a riotous, no-holds-barred memoir, he fires a volley of invective at his detractors and deplores the BBC's descent into political correctness.
Virtuoso violinist Nigel Kennedy talks about drugs, sex and all-night partying in his memoirs
He talks about drugs (yes, he smokes cannabis), sex, all-night partying — and how he's standing by his son Sark, 25, jailed earlier this month for drug-dealing after being caught with £15,500 worth of cocaine in his car.
'He knows that I'm around to offer him an alternative life and he knows that I love him. I'm going to see him (in prison) pretty soon so I'll remind him of that.
'I just hope he's going to be successful in what he's trying to do, which is to change his life and turn it around. But I'm not going to pull him up by the ear. It's not my place.
'We have all these relatives in Australia and it would be a really fantastic opportunity to start a new life there, away from his old circles. But he's an adult. You can give people opportunities but they have to make up their own mind.'
Nigel Kennedy, 64, is a man of fierce loyalties and ardently held opinions. I had expected bluster and braggadocio. I hadn't reckoned on humour, affability and charm. He's talking to me via Zoom from the studio of the timber house, remote in the Polish countryside, he shares with Agnieszka, 43, his second wife, and their elderly weimaraner, Huxley.
'We're in the wilderness. There are bears, but they're quite shy, not like American grizzlies, and wolves,' he enthuses. 'We've got a huge vegetable patch — Agnieszka instigated it — and beehives. We go hiking!'
He has always been provocative: his bog-brush hair and concert get-up mark him as a maverick. Long ago he eschewed the performer's traditional black tailcoat — the outfit of a 'poncing underpaid butler', as he puts it — and often performs wearing bovver boots, cargo pants and his football jersey. The stuffy elite deplore his anarchism; his vast army of fans applaud his determination to bring classical music to the masses.
Nigel Kennedy (right) with Bob Geldof at the 'Backbeat' Party in 1994, as Beatlemania rocked back to Britain for the premiere of a film about the Beatles' early days
He's been dubbed the 'punk violinist' and more acerbically, 'a latter-day Liberace with his ludicrous clothes'. (This from the late Sir John Drummond, one-time director of the Proms and controller of BBC Radio 3.)
He points out that Sir John — an 'elite toff' — at times garnered as few as 250 listeners at Radio 3, turning it into 'an unattainable exclusive club'. Meanwhile, Kennedy, a glittering alumnus of the Yehudi Menuhin School (the great violinist actually paid his fees) was packing the 5,000-seat Royal Albert Hall to the rafters.
'And I don't think he [Sir John] played the piano as well as Liberace,' he says. 'He was a purist; he didn't like Liberace's white piano and candelabra. I didn't really like Liberace either, but he was a skilful piano player.'
And Kennedy laments the fact that the taxpayer-funded BBC has become 'a teeth-gnashing, pitiful and desperately wannabe politically correct institution', concluding: 'Public reaction to this self-indulgence is already taking the shape of even more apathy and resentment, which will inevitably lead to refusal to pay the licence fee and the discarding of TV in general in favour of the internet.'
Kennedy renames one BBC First Night of the Proms the 'Farce Night', decrying its 'tedious desperation' to burnish its woke credentials after one singer dedicated her performance to 'transgender people all around the world'.
Nigel Kennedy as a young boy, holding his violin while he met the Queen Mother in the early 1960s
'What for? Why?' he asks incredulously. 'That type of irrelevant superficial claptrap was too much to take and had nothing to do with the music she was performing, unless she thought it couldn't stand up for itself.
'To think that we pay a licence fee to hear that kind of spouting. I respect everyone whatever their gender, but meritocracy is what we're looking for. This insistence on quotas and equality of outcome . . . there should be an equal chance for everyone as long as they're prepared to work hard.'
Kennedy, never reticent about expressing his views, was not prepared to let the singer's comments pass unremarked.
'I've experienced a mixed feeling or two about the toffs waving Union Jacks. I found myself a bit averse to all of that jingoism, but now that everyone in the media is so anti-white British my feelings have become a bit more tolerant. Every other group of people is allowed to talk about their race and big it up'
He was due to play Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending and Monti's Czardas, and during his rehearsal with the orchestra, he recalls: 'I quipped in a similar bleating manner to the singer, 'I would like to dedicate my part of the performance to all the forgotten and displaced heterosexuals around the world.' '
This light-hearted riposte misfired. He was met with an 'unamused glower' from two women in the viola section, 'As if heterosexuals shouldn't be recognised or allowed to celebrate anything'. 'The conductor also seemed rather unsupportive,' he adds.
Nigel Kennedy's son Sark Yves Amadeus Kennedy (pictured), 25, was found guilty of drug dealing and jailed for 33 months after £15,500 worth of cocaine was found in his car
'I know some people suffer from a chronic sense-of-humour shortage and I sincerely wish them a speedy recovery.'
Although he is Left-wing and fervently anti-elitist, he now finds his sympathies veering towards the white British middle classes.
'I've had a fair few good nights at the Proms. I've experienced a mixed feeling or two about the toffs waving Union Jacks. First of all, I found myself a bit averse to all of that jingoism, but now that everyone in the media is so anti-white British my feelings have become a bit more tolerant. Every other group of people is allowed to talk about their race and big it up.
'And once the Scottish finally have to leave our UK, we won't see the Union Jack any more and it's a shame, because it's a killa [great] looking flag.'
Such unfashionable views have, it seems, made him persona non grata at the BBC. 'They won't make any shows with me any more. Jimmy Savile was OK but apparently I'm not!'
He has always been a dissident, his soaring musical talent matched by rebelliousness and an epic capacity for partying.
Does he still love a shindig? 'Of course! There's a lot of adrenaline coursing round your body after a concert, when you're trying to deliver the
