Dave Kendall, the music journalist, producer and broadcaster who created MTV’s landmark alternative-music program 120 Minutes and became its defining early host, has died.

Former 120 Minutes host Matt Pinfield shared news of Kendall’s death on social media, remembering him as “one of the true believers” who championed alternative music before it crossed into the mainstream.

A native of England, Kendall began his career writing and editing for publications including Melody Maker, Spin and the New York Post. After relocating to New York, he was hired by MTV, where he conceived 120 Minutes and spent seven years working as a writer, producer, presenter and news reporter.

The show premiered March 10, 1986, offering two late-night hours of music that received little or no exposure during MTV’s regular rotation. Kendall initially worked behind the scenes and appeared in occasional segments before becoming a regular host, a role he held through 1992.

Long before “alternative” became a radio format and a major-label marketing category, 120 Minutes moved freely between post-punk, goth, industrial, college rock, shoegaze, electronic music and the emerging American underground. The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode and The Sisters of Mercy could share a broadcast with Pixies, Sonic Youth, Nitzer Ebb, KMFDM, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Ride, Lush, Slowdive and Nirvana.

Kendall’s presentation was notably low-key for MTV. He was dry, informed and sometimes visibly amused by the absurdity unfolding around him, but he rarely tried to compete with his guests. He interviewed musicians like a working music journalist rather than a television personality looking for a moment of his own.

The surviving footage now doubles as an extensive video history of alternative music just before — and during — its unlikely rise into the mainstream.

Peter Murphy joined Kendall to co-host the May 3, 1992, edition of 120 Minutes, timed to the release of his third solo album, Holy Smoke.

Murphy discussed the making of the record and introduced footage from a small promotional performance. The full episode also includes “The Sweetest Drop” and a live version of “Keep Me From Harm,” filmed at the Communion night at New York’s Limelight.

Kendall also asked Murphy about the possibility of working again with his former Bauhaus bandmates. Murphy was open to playing with them, but wary of doing so as Bauhaus — a position that became considerably more interesting after the band began its first reunion six years later.

One of Kendall’s most memorable interviews aired on Christmas Eve 1989, when a pre-superstardom Trent Reznor appeared on the show to help decorate its deliberately threadbare Christmas tree.

Reznor discussed Nine Inch Nails’ prospective next single, “Head Like a Hole,” while Kendall tried out a Nine Inch Nails Christmas-stocking joke. Joey Ramone appeared elsewhere in the same episode to present Kendall with gifts supposedly sent by Mikhail Gorbachev and the Ramones — the sort of collision that could only have occurred on late-’80s MTV.

Kendall checked in with Nine Inch Nails again during the inaugural Lollapalooza tour in 1991, interviewing Reznor and then-guitarist Richard Patrick, who later formed Filter. The segment captures the group after the underground success of Pretty Hate Machine but before Reznor became one of the defining artists of the decade.

Kendall interviewed the Sisters of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch in 1990 around the release of Vision Thing, the band’s third — and still most recent — studio album. The interview aired in segments surrounding the video for the album’s Jim Steinman-assisted epic “More.”

The following year, Kendall took 120 Minutes to England’s Reading Festival for what he introduced as the show’s first international edition.

The broadcast featured interviews with Eldritch, Sonic Youth, Nitzer Ebb and James, along with a wider assortment of festival acts. Eldritch, smoking and characteristically skeptical, discussed the Sisters’ difficulties touring the United States, tensions surrounding the band’s shows and the possibility of another album — a record fans are, of course, still waiting for.

The same broadcast included Douglas McCarthy and Bon Harris of Nitzer Ebb, then touring behind Ebbhead. Their appearance alongside the Sisters and Sonic Youth illustrated the breadth of Kendall’s programming: industrial electronics, gothic rock and American noise could coexist without being divided into separate demographic boxes.

In February 1992, Kendall filmed an entire episode in Tijuana with John Lydon, who was in Mexico shooting Public Image Ltd.’s video for “Covered.”

Kendall later called Lydon one of the most engaging and enraging people he encountered at MTV. His own website preserved the full episode alongside footage from other assignments, including the Reading Festival, lunch with Depeche Mode in London and an episode co-hosted by Iggy Pop.

The archive of Kendall-era appearances reads like a sprawling post-punk family tree.

A May 1990 episode found Kendall interviewing Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry and former Talking Heads members Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison ahead of that summer’s Escape From New York tour, whose bill featured the Ramones, Harry, Tom Tom Club and Harrison.

In 1991, Daniel Ash sat down with Kendall to discuss his first solo album, Coming Down, bringing the histories of Bauhaus, Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets into a single conversation.

Other Kendall interviews and co-hosting appearances included Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Siouxsie Sioux, Nick Cave, Ian McCulloch, Courtney Love, Henry Rollins and members of KMFDM, Nitzer Ebb and Nine Inch Nails.

The most historically significant Kendall introduction aired Sept. 29, 1991, when 120 Minutes presented the world premiere of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Wearing sunglasses because of conjunctivitis, Kendall introduced the video with none of the retrospective fanfare now attached to it. Nirvana was simply another band the program believed viewers should know about — placed in the regular flow of a show that had already spent years making space for Pixies, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney and the wider independent-rock underground.

The video proved popular enough to move into MTV’s daytime rotation. Within months, the underground culture 120 Minutes had documented was being recast as the commercial center of the music industry.

Kendall’s career after leaving MTV in 1992 extended well beyond alternative-music nostalgia.

He hosted and co-produced the nationally syndicated interview program Music Scoupe, co-hosted the internationally broadcast Soccer Rocks the Globe concert and anchored the Woodstock ’94 pay-per-view. His radio work included Hot 97’s electronic-music program Planet Traxx and the syndicated alternative shows Left of the Dial and Cross Currents.

In the mid-’90s, Kendall shifted into online media, creating the early streaming-video music site Alterworld and later editing and hosting Columbia Records’ streaming music-news show The Daily Dish. He also developed digital projects for Raygun Publishing and served as director of content at Soundbreak.com, overseeing a staff of writers, producers, engineers and video editors.

He continued working as a club DJ, including a seven-year residency at New York’s Limelight, and released the continuous-mix album A Voyage Into Trance, Volume 2 through Cleopatra’s Hypnotic imprint in 2002. That year, he returned to television production, writing, producing and story-editing programs for TechTV/G4, Sky, Channel 4, the Travel Channel and Animal Planet.

Kendall relocated to Thailand in 2005. He later hosted programs on SiriusXM’s First Wave channel, beginning with Party 360 in 2008, and presented and produced the weekly travel program Destination Thailand.

Beginning in 2017, he worked at the Bangkok Post, writing and editing stories, producing multimedia projects, conducting interviews and anchoring programs. His later reporting covered politics, technology, travel, climate change and public affairs — a continuation of his career as a journalist rather than an extended attempt to relive his years at MTV.

Kendall returned to 120 Minutes for the original series’ final episode, broadcast on MTV2 on May 4, 2003. He appeared alongside host Jim Shearer and fellow former host Matt Pinfield to look back on the program’s 17-year run.

Kendall’s farewell block included R.E.M.’s “Driver 8,” Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” and the Sisters of Mercy’s “This Corrosion.” He described the latter as a “great bombastic video,” specifically recalling its images of the band riding stallions through the desert.

Asked for a favorite memory, Kendall instead remembered his first interview, with Fetchin’ Bones singer Hope Nicholls. He began asking a question, froze and could go no further. “And it was all downhill from there,” he joked.

It wasn’t.

The final video broadcast on the original 120 Minutes was another Kendall selection: Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Kiss Them for Me.”

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