Dave Kendall deserves all the props in the world for coming up with one of the most inspirational and influential shows in MTV’s history: 120 Minutes.
He’d been a writer for music magazines and the UK press as well as for the music channel, and had suggested creating a two-hour show that showcased the great independent music out there that deserved a closer look. He wanted something outside of the mainstream, something akin to the burgeoning era of 80s college radio which at the time was focusing on punk, post-punk, new wave, industrial, EBM, and pretty much anything that didn’t quite conform to the charts or corporate radio. Never mind that the show was on at midnight on Sunday evening, and never mind that, like the early days of the channel, they winged it as they went along; soon after its debut on March 10, 1986, it caught on with high school and college kids and music nerds like me, and we programmed our VHS recorders to catch the latest episodes. It was so beloved that it now has its own archival website, detailing several years worth of episode playlists.
Interestingly, he was not its original host, though he did show up in every episode in the first few years, hosting the music review and top ten college radio countdown segments, often obscured by discolored lo-fi video feedback. He’d finally come out of the shadows and take over from the oddball Kevin Seal in 1989, staying there until 1992.
His delivery was quintessentially Gen-X Punk despite his slightly older age, snarky as fuck when a band’s music threatened to fall into its own navel, chatty and knowledgeable during his interviews, extremely obsessive and encyclopedic whenever a band with a long history dropped something new (his later successor Matt Pinfield certainly learned from him in this respect), wasn’t above taking the piss (such as the above, decorating a studio Christmas tree with a bemused and possibly pasted Trent Reznor on the 24 December 1989 episode, which also featured the string quartet The Ordinaires playing holiday music and a highly confused Ramones stopping by as well). He even got a laugh out of The Whitman Samplers in 1990 when they sampled him over a Funky Drummer beat.
Dave and 120 Minutes helped lift alternative rock out of semi-obscurity and into the mainstream. So many writers say that the scene started in 1991 with Nirvana and PNW grunge, but it really started much earlier in the late 80s with college radio and this show. This wasn’t just a scene, it was a slowly-building and expanding movement, one where you didn’t necessarily have to dress up or go to a club if you didn’t want to (or couldn’t). You could sit in your dimly lit bedroom and just take this all in while you pasted pictures of The Smiths and Siouxsie and Sinéad O’Connor and Depeche Mode on your walls, wrote your song lyrics and learned how to play a guitar not in the style of squealy hair metal. Prefaced by an hour’s worth of British humor with The Young Ones, The Comic Strip and Monty Python during its late 80s heyday, those three hours together were like an open secret for those who didn’t or chose not to fit in with the mainstream. You didn’t just look forward to the episode, you watched it and rewatched it constantly, because this stuff was not played anywhere else on TV or on the radio in your town. It reminded you that there was more out there, so much more out there than just what you were being fed, and it fueled you to keep going.
It was a show that brought me together with a circle of friends in late 1986, who ended up being lifelong acquaintances because we all loved that sound so much. I admit I obsessed over it far more than everyone else in that group, but in the process I became the go-to when you wanted to dub a copy of an album or grab a few songs you didn’t own for your latest mixtape. And yes, for a while I even had those 120 Minutes episodes tucked away on video. I might not have those videos anymore, but my music library continues to expand to this day partly because of the show’s influence on me. I now get my music fix via KEXP FM, which has carried the torch and continued playing all the best at the left of the dial. But it all started there, on those late Sunday evenings.
As Kevin Seal would often say after each music review segment: Thanks, Dave!
Walk In Silence 