I apologise if you hear any buzzing,” says Roman Kemp, the 31-year-old radio and television presenter, leaning back in his chair. I’ve done interviews in some strange scenarios, including a sauna (twice), but this is a new one. Kemp, who is in Northern Ireland filming the BBC One quizshow The Finish Line, is video-calling me on his day off from the tattoo parlour. As he holds the phone to his face, an artist is at work inking a portrait of Thierry Henry on to his shin. “On my right leg I want to try to build as many of my favourite footballers of all time,” Kemp explains. “So I started out with original Ronaldo and we’re currently doing Thierry, and then we’ll add from there. So it’s a work in progress but yes, as I’ll show you… Very much happening.”
Kemp spins the camera, just in time to catch the needle tracing his skin. Isn’t that quite painful? “Once you go past a certain amount of tattoos, you earn the right to use numbing cream,” he replies. “When I first started having them, especially some of the bigger ones, a lot of parlours want you to have the full experience. And I just suffered for many hours, and hated it. I’m too much of a wuss to do it any more to myself. I refuse to sit here in pain.”
Kemp, who has bouncy golden hair and intense blue eyes, had his first tattoo, underage, at 17 when he was on holiday abroad, and adds to them every six months or so. “I try not to have any on my arms or neck, obviously, for television,” he says. “But from here down” – he points to his chest – “we’re losing real estate, basically. It’s 100% addictive.” Some are silly (Bart Simpson), but others are more meaningful. His camera still on, Kemp gives me an upside-down view of his leg with a swallow holding a rose in its beak. The tattoo is a replica of one that his friend Joe Lyons, who took his own life in 2020, had. Lyons was a colleague at the radio station Capital UK – where he was known as Producer Joe – and when Kemp started presenting the breakfast show in 2017, the pair became inseparable.
“I remember the day he got the tattoo, I was like, ‘Why have you got that?’” says Kemp, smiling. “I just kept rinsing him: ‘They’ve done it wrong. It looks like a pigeon.’ Then after he died, I got it in the exact same position by the same artist. It’s not for some divine meaning or whatever. I just wanted something on me to look down and make me smile. And, to me, it’ll never be a swallow, it will always be a pigeon.”
I hadn’t expected to speak about Lyons so early in our conversation, but in some ways the death of his friend has become a pivotal moment in Kemp’s life and career. He was presenting Capital Breakfast on 4 August 2020 when he learned something was wrong. Lyons hadn’t come into work at 6am and, as his fears mounted, Kemp had little choice but to keep doing the show: playing songs, chatting with his co-hosts, interviewing Little Mix.
“We followed the whole journey,” Kemp recalls. “I found out that he was in his house. I found out that he wasn’t breathing. I found out that he was dead in the space of two to three hours. Yeah, had to keep on broadcasting. That was my decision. And by the way, that’s not like, ‘Keep on broadcasting!’ It was, ‘Let’s try to work out what’s going on here.’ Then I don’t remember the rest of the day. My brain just blanked it out.”
Kemp was something of a superstar of commercial radio. Everyone joked that he only had a job because of his famous parents – his dad, Martin, was the bassist for Spandau Ballet and longtime EastEnders star and his mum, Shirlie, was a backing singer for Wham! and half of Pepsi & Shirlie – not least Kemp himself. But first with Vick Hope, and then with Sonny Jay and Siân Welby, he grew Capital Breakfast’s audience to 2.5m listeners a week. Kemp was known for his upbeat chat and viral interviews, perhaps most famously when he asked a bemused Keanu Reeves a slew of questions about Joe Wicks and the hardware store Wickes, rather than the movie he was promoting, John Wick. He also cemented his place in the cultural firmament by finishing third in the 2019 edition of I’m a Celebrity…
But after Lyons’s death, we saw a different side to Kemp. In 2021, he presented a BBC Three documentary, Our Silent Emergency, that investigated the high incidences of suicide among young men in the UK. It was a moving and unapologetically personal film, and it has since become widely screened to sixth-formers in schools. In the film, Kemp admitted he had suffered from depression and panic attacks since he was a teenager, keeping it in check with the antidepressant sertraline. His conversations with boys and young men whose friends had committed suicide were more powerful because Kemp was still grappling with his own conflicted emotions about Lyons: grief, of course, but also confusion and even anger.
“Absolutely, that was entirely selfish to make that [Our Silent Emergency],” says Kemp. “Not at all was I thinking about, ‘Oh, this would be really great for the community.’ Or, ‘This would be really great for my profile…’ It was, ‘What the fuck has happened? And how do I use my position to find out answers – for me.’ Listen, if that’s a bad thing to say, I don’t know, but I just thought: ‘OK, I need to figure out what’s happened, because I need to know.’”
Whatever Kemp’s intentions, after Our Silent Emergency aired, the Samaritans received a significant increase in young people calling to talk about their mental health. He followed it in 2023 with another documentary, Roman Kemp: the Fight for Young Lives, which took more of a campaigning tack: how do we stop suicides happening? Kemp, who has 1.4m followers on Instagram and used social media to spread his message, was now in a dialogue with government ministers and with the Princess of Wales, who contacted him when she launched her Shaping Us mental health campaign (and, apparently, took off her shoes when she went round to the Kemp house for tea).
Kemp admits he is an unlikely activist and it’s still something he is trying to get his head around. In March 2024, he left Capital after almost a decade at the station. One of the main reasons for his departure was that he was struggling to handle spending every morning in the room where he learned of Lyons’s death. Going to work felt as if it was triggering PTSD. Meanwhile, outside the studio, he had become “a poster boy for suicide”. He says, “Those films changed my life. All of a sudden, my life revolves around people coming up to me, telling me that they’ve tried to kill themselves. You never know what the next twist of your life will be.”
Not something Kemp would have foreseen then? “The only thing I would have predicted is that people still say I only have what I have because my dad,” he replies with a smirk. “That’s the only thing I could predict. That’s very obvious.”
Future generations of nepo babies could learn a lot from Roman Kemp. His response to his upbringing – inspired by the Eminem character in the 2002 film 8 Mile – is to turn the most withering put-downs on himself before anyone else has the chance. “I could not give a fuck, just take complete ownership of it,” he says. “Every school I ever went into, every room I ever went into, people already had a preconceived idea of who I was and what I was like. So I never had anything to lose. Every school I went to was the same: ‘He’s a famous kid, famous dad, must have loads of money. Bet he gets anything he asks for.’ So I always used to take pride in being, ‘OK, here’s all my faults. Have ’em. Enjoy.’”
Kemp was born in Los Angeles, but grew up in Hertfordshire; he also has an older sister, Harley. By the time he came along, in 1993, both Spandau Ballet and Pepsi & Shirlie had split, but Martin Kemp was finding new fame as an actor in The Krays, the 1990 biopic of the British gangster twins in which he starred with his brother Gary, and from 1998 in EastEnders. At home, Shirlie’s best friend (and Kemp’s godfather) was George Michael. Kemp realised early on that his childhood was different from other kids’, in part because teachers would ask for his dad’s autograph.
Initially, it looked like Kemp would follow in the family business. Aged 15, he signed a 360 deal with Universal, in which a label gives financial support to an artist in return for future revenue. He played bass and guitar: “Much like my dad, I just stand there,” he deadpans. There was also a symmetry in that both his parents had broken through and signed their first deals as teenagers. For Roman, though, something wasn’t clicking. “You were basically a music label’s bitch,” says Kemp. “You’d be forced to join any project they were working on or writing for. To be honest, it was a lot too soon and I didn’t enjoy that. So by the age of 18, I packed it in.”
By this point, Kemp had been diagnosed with clinical depression. He started becoming distant at home in his early teens: the anxiety he was experiencing was exacerbated by the fact that he knew he could scarcely come from a background of more privilege. His mother was the first to notice. When he was 15, she arranged an appointment and Kemp was prescribed antidepressants. In Our Silent Emergency, Shirlie recalls: “I remember saying to Dad, ‘I think Roman suffers depression.’ And it wasn’t that you suffered depression because your life was bad, I think it’s a chemical thing with you. That’s what I saw in you: I saw mood swings. You just withdrew.”
A period of odd jobs followed his brief music career: Kemp was taken on by the agency Models 1; he became a personal trainer at his local leisure centre in Rickmansworth. “I remember being like, ‘I don’t want to be famous,’” he says. “So I worked in the gym. Which, to be honest, any person that works in a gym will tell you, it’s a glorified cleaner. You’re just cleaning the toilets. And I didn’t leave the gym, really, until I was in the store cupboard eating my dinner, sitting on the floor, and I was like, ‘Fuck this.’”
Kemp bought film and editing equipment and started uploading football videos on YouTube. These – and a fortuitous encounter with the son of Richard Park, one of the most influential figures in commercial radio, in a bar during the 2014 World Cup – were enough to see him given a chance by Capital. “Listen, the public narrative is Martin Kemp called up and said, ‘Give my son a job,’” he says. “But luck was on my side.”
There is an ease and swagger to Kemp on radio – and in conversation – that suggests he is a natural for it. But he insists that he’s much more introverted than that. “I really upset my mum recently, because I said that sometimes I feel like I don’t fit in with our family,” says Kemp. “I go back home and my dad will be on the piano, my sister will be singing, my mum’s taking videos and pictures. And I just want to be on my own. I’m not… embarrassed by it, but that form of extroversion is not really me.”
Kemp is an intriguing dichotomy: he is happy to livestream his tattoo session or talk about his depression, but he also has strict lines he won’t cross, especially his relationships. “Every now and again, there’s something that’s really nice about getting in a taxi and the cab driver doesn’t know everything about you,” he says. “Whether that be family life or anything, it’s really important to have things that mean something to you that you don’t necessarily share with the world. Because everyone these days shares everything.”
Almost a year on from leaving Capital, Kemp remains convinced he has made the right decision. “It’s really like living a new life,” he says. “The number one question that obviously people will ask is, ‘Do you miss it?’ And the answer is no, but not in a negative connotation.
“Actually James Corden sent me… sorry that was a horrendous name drop, but it was true,” he goes on. “He sent me an interview with David Bowie, where Bowie said that the sweet spot in life is when you get to that point in the swimming pool where your toes just about can’t touch the bottom. And I realised that I wasn’t there with Capital any more. I was very much standing – at waist height. I was just breezing it. It was my everyday and I wanted to step out into the pool a little bit further.”
Since leaving Capital, Kemp has become a regular presenter on The One Show and has launched a knockabout podcast with his dad called FFS! My Dad is Martin Kemp where they chew over life’s big problems: death, parenting and fame. There will be more of both of those in 2025, plus he’s not finished with the activism. In August, Kemp is planning to announce a new nationwide mental-health initiative – he can’t reveal more right now, but predicts it will be “something great”.
Kemp’s tattoo is finished; he turns round his phone and shows a very decent likeness of Henry. He’s not sure who’s going to be next: maybe Luís Figo or Pavel Nedvěd, or perhaps he’ll go for the GOAT, Leo Messi.
As a final question, I ask him if he feels like he’s at a crossroads in his career, but Kemp shakes his head. “No, I’m just driving down and seeing where I fancy going to next,” he says. “Also it’s like, ‘Do I want to stop driving? Keep driving?’ It’s a question that my agents say to me all the time: ‘What do you want to do?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, I’m enjoying life.’”
If you have been affected by any of these issues, call Samaritans on 116 123
Styling Helen Seamons; fashion assistants Sam Deaman and Roz Donoghue; grooming by Paul Donovan using Nars
