Reggae champion David Rodigan still DJing 40 years on
Forty years after he first helped introduce reggae to the UK, veteran DJ David Rodigan tells the Today Programme's Tom Bateman why he still gets excited about discovering new music.
It is 0030 GMT at a packed nightclub in south London.
Around 300 people are queuing to get in, stretching the length of this small street, just off the not-so-glamorous Elephant and Castle roundabout.
Ask any of them why they are here, and you are likely to get a one word answer: "Rodigan."
David Rodigan's name might not be widely known outside the worlds of reggae, dub and their contemporary derivations - but his impact on the British music scene over four decades is immeasurable.
One club-goer sums it up with a simple, rhetorical question: "David Rodigan - didn't he bring reggae to Britain?"
While the cultural history of the 1960s fits a well rehearsed narrative - the importance of new British "pop" and the influence of bands like the Beatles and Stones - a simultaneous influence on British teenagers was coming from elsewhere.
David Rodigan was enthralled by artists like Desmond Dekker
Thousands of young people had been discovering a driving new beat from Jamaica known as "ska".
"I remember Jukebox Jury with David Jacobs and Janice from Birmingham saying 'I'll give it five'," says Rodigan.
"I remember them talking about this new sound from Jamaica.
"It was just a whole new world," he says, as he sits beside his box of records in a narrow upstairs dressing room in the club, with its corrugated roof resembling an aircraft hangar.
Rodigan was 14 when The Wailers released their first album, The Wailing Wailers, in 1965.
The album included the original version of One Love, later to become an iconic number for frontman Bob Marley, and Rodigan became hooked on the sounds emanating from Jamaica at the time.
"It was the birth of a new generation, of course," he says.
"Jamaica had got its independence in 1962. The music was young, lively and fresh."
From then on, Rodigan was to become a key part of the explosion into British popular culture of ska, reggae and dub music.
By the mid-60s he was amassing a large collection of records, and began to make his name as one of the pioneering Jamaican-music DJs in England.
Radical sounds
But as a white middle-class boy from Oxfordshire, Rodigan acknowledges that there were challenges getting his credibility accepted in the genre.
He recalls an occasion he turned up for an audition to host a reggae show on BBC radio in the 1970s.
"The producer of the show stopped my audition after 15 minutes and said, 'Thank you Mr Rodigan, that was very interesting. You obviously know about the music but we're actually looking for a black presenter'."
Rodigan remains excited about reggae, even after 40 years
But he got the job after the BBC played the audition tape to record producers in Jamaica who backed him.
For Rodigan, a great attraction of the music - like for many who were discovering it in the 1960s - was its political nature.
One of the first international hits from Jamaica was Desmond Dekker's Israelites whose lyrics "Get up in the morning slaving for bread, sir/So that every mouth can be fed", resonated with references to the history of slavery.
For Rodigan it was an essential part of the music's message.
"It was so outspoken," he says.
"It did stand for the sufferer, social injustice. Songs such as Slavedriver, from the legendary album by The Wailers, Catch a Fire.
"These were songs that spoke out about what the black man had been through in 400 years."
Rodigan accepts that some of the music that has followed has failed to live up to the challenging and outspoken lyrics of that time, but he remains excited about the new sounds he plays.
The DJ , who will be 60 this year, still pulls in large crowds at some of the UK's best-known clubs and recently recorded an album with the "superclub" Fabric.
He says he never loses sight of "what first made it so interesting", and is able to keep appealing to new generations "by continuing to investigate and seek out new hits".
At 0130 GMT Rodigan walks down the stairs, via a fire escape, on his way to the decks to play to hundreds of young clubbers who have turned up for a night of dubstep and drum & bass, and a few of the old Rodigan classics.
On the way, the DJ is stopped by a woman no older than 20, who embraces him before saying, nervously: "I can't believe it's you."
It seems the Rodigan legacy, 40 years on, lives on.
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