Dave Kendall, who made MTV a home for alternative music, dies at 63

For a certain kind of music fan growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the week did not really end until midnight on Sunday, when a soft-spoken Englishman came on MTV to play the songs no one else on television would. That was Dave Kendall, and the show was "120 Minutes." He died on July 14 at 63; no cause was announced.

The show he built

Mr. Kendall pitched and then created "120 Minutes," which premiered on MTV on March 10, 1986, and hosted it through the early 1990s. At a time when commercial radio and MTV's daytime rotation leaned heavily on arena rock and pop, he built a late-night home for what was then called college rock, alternative, and indie, the darker, stranger, more adventurous music bubbling up from clubs and campus stations. Bands like The Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode and R.E.M. found, in his two hours a week, a national audience they could not get anywhere else on TV.

He treated the job less like a video jockey's and more like a critic's, choosing what to play on the merits and bringing the sensibility of a music writer to a visual medium. In 1991 the show gave many viewers an early look at Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," months before the Seattle sound broke into the mainstream.

Where he came from, and where he went

Before MTV, Mr. Kendall worked as a music journalist, writing for British publications including Melody Maker before moving to the United States. After stepping away from "120 Minutes," where he was succeeded by Matt Pinfield, he continued in music and media for decades, as a radio host and, later in life, as a producer and correspondent based in Southeast Asia. Mr. Pinfield, paying tribute, remembered him as someone who "loved the music, respected the artists," a description that matched the show he made.

The legacy

"120 Minutes" outlived its original run in influence. In the years before the internet made every obscure band a click away, it was a genuine act of discovery, a place where a teenager in a town with one record store could stumble onto a whole world of sound. Musicians would later credit the show with giving them their first exposure; fans credited it with an education. That Mr. Kendall built it inside MTV, the very machine of mainstream pop, was the trick of it, and his lasting argument: that there was an audience for the difficult and the new, if only someone would put it on the air.