'I'm the daddy!'
Award-winning Trevor Nelson may be a senior figure at BBC radio, but music keeps him young
Ruth Roxanne Board
- Matt Charlton
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Thirty years since he started at Radio 1, and fresh from an Arias award ceremony (the audio industry’s Baftas), where he received the Judges’ Special Recognition Award for his cultural impact on the UK music scene, I ask Trevor Nelson to put self-deprecation to one side and try to sum up the impact he’s had on Black British music. “It’s nice to get these flowers,” he says. “It’s really nice to get the awards, but the place I was in 30 plus years ago was more like, ‘This music is great. Our music is great.’”
But how to sum up and encapsulate all of this greatness – the genres, the cultural shifts, the scenes? Two cultural institutions are trying. Off the back of the V&A East’s The Music Is Black exhibition, the BBC has a season of programming under the same name, the centrepiece being an exuberant Radio 2 concert recorded at the Hackney Empire in east London, hosted by Nelson and DJ Spoony, in the heart of their old stamping ground.
Trevor Nelson at the turntable in October 1999. Alamy
“The concert is just a snapshot,” says Nelson. “You know, it’s just a little sprinkling. It could have gone in 80,000 directions, there’s so many talented artists.” This particular sprinkling includes Alison Limerick, 2-Tone singer Rhoda Dakar and sax star Courtney Pine, all to the backing of the Chineke! Orchestra and the LJ Singers. “It’s a great show for what it was,” says Nelson, humbly. “It was a nod to the V&A’s exhibition. It was also a nod to the East End.”
Nelson cut his teeth in his beloved Hackney as part of the sound system culture – pop-up happenings centred around custom-built speaker stacks – brought over to the UK by the Windrush Generation in the 1950s. “I was at the coalface of people like me, who were just addicts for the music, and would spend their wages on an album or a single from America, because we loved it. So that’s where the addiction came from – it’s like buying a very expensive drug!”
I love going to work. I bounce around like a child
Getting high on his own supply, and the need to share it, pushed him behind the mic, first broadcasting on fledgeling pirate radio station Kiss FM, then being among a host of names, including Dave Pearce, Judge Jules and Danny Rampling, poached by Radio 1 during a brutal but necessary refresh in the 90s. As musician Rhoda Dakar put it on her Instagram, “[The Music Is Black] was hosted by two men… who broke the law to play the music written and performed by [people] that spoke of talent sculpted as Black Britons. Two men now ensconced on Radio 2’s record-breaking schedules.”
Nelson, 30 years later aged 62, still somehow steps up the zeal when talking about his current gig. “I love going to work, I bounce around the eighth floor like a child. You’d never think I was a senior in that environment. I’m actually the oldest on daytime. So, I’m the daddy!” I suggest that it’s a sign of how far we’ve come that when he was announced as the new afternoon host, not one paper mentioned that he was the first Black DJ to take a daytime role at the station.
Alison Limerick at The Music Is Black concert. James Watkins
“One paper did!” he corrects. “I was fully aware that I would be the first Black DJ to do a daytime show on Auntie’s favourite. It’s the biggest station I’ve had anything to do with. Steve Wright was just a giant of broadcasting and I’m in his old slot… that’s enough to put anybody off! But he had a massive love for Black music – the one place on the network in the daytime that you’d hear the odd soul song was Steve Wright in the Afternoon.”
Black music is now at the centre of, and embraced by, our cultural institutions. Other pioneers should be mentioned – Tony Blackburn with his love of Motown, Robbie Vincent – “a legend of mine” – Jacqueline Springer, the curator of The Music Is Black at the V&A who started at 1Xtra, and finally Kanya King, the founder of the Mobo Awards who died recently, aged 57. “Thirty years ago, she walked into my office and said, ‘I want to start an organisation called Music of Black Origin,’” Nelson recalls, “and I thought, ‘What a genius title,’ because Black music is made by all sorts in this country – we amalgamate.”
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It does feel like a significant time to stop and celebrate the UK’s capacity to amalgamate, and to celebrate Nelson’s enthusiasm that has driven that forward over the past three decades. “I think you can hear, I’m having a really good time. I think we’ve broken down quite a lot of barriers over the years.”
Authors
Matt Charlton
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