By Bernadette McNulty

He may be a mere whippersnapper compared to radio’s current golden girl duo of Beryl and Betty, but when DJ David Rodigan picked up a Sony Gold award on the same night last week as the Humberside grannies, it felt like deserved recognition for his near 35 years service bringing reggae music to audiences around the world. The 60-year-old, whose prize-winning Radio 2 show started again on Monday, said he was surprised to have snatched the award from 2011’s winner Ronnie Wood. Fellow DJ Trevor Nelson, who presented the gong for best specialist music programme, said that if he had known he was giving it to Rodigan, he would have worn a tie, and described him as “the best black music presenter on British radio”. “Coming from Trevor, that was an incredibly kind and generous comment. Race is not a big issue, but when I started out as a white man in a black man’s world, there were a few people who questioned what I was doing. They thought I was getting on a bandwagon. But I just used to reply that all I was doing was loving their music.”

Rodigan does cut an incongruous figure in the world of reggae – in his thick rimmed glasses he looks like the taller one out of the artists Gilbert and George – but it is exactly this air of the English gentleman enthusiast, that has probably made him such an effective crusader for reggae both in the UK and around the world, and a role model to DJs like Nelson and Tim Westwood. As a child growing up in the Oxfordshire village of Kidlington, Rodigan got hooked on the new Jamaican ska and rocksteady sounds like My Girl Lollipop listening to pirate radio under the sheets, “I was very fortunate to be a teenager in the Sixties. We had the Stones, the Beatles and in Jamaica it was the Wailers, the Skatalites and Prince Buster. I just completely fell in love with the music and started to collect it.” Going off to study economics at the LSE, he never considered a career as a DJ. “I played at school discos but those days the DJ was the nerdy guy playing records in the corner of the room. It wasn’t very cool.” After realising working in an office was not for him, Rodigan switch his ambitions to an acting career, coveting a spot in the Royal Shakespeare Company. He didn’t quite make it to Stratford but still worked steadily in repertory theatre across the country along with roles on TV, making a bit of extra cash in the evenings playing his extensive record collection at local events. “I remember playing Aerial in the Tempest at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke on Trent and then heading off to the West Indian club and sometimes I wouldn’t have taken my make-up off properly. These Jamaican guys would stare at me and ask me what was on my face and why was I wearing make-up. You can imagine the fuss it caused.”

His record playing turned professional in 1979 with a full-time live reggae show on London’s Capital Radio and after a decade pursuing both acting and DJ careers, and with a wife and two young children to support, he had to choose between the two. Reggae won out and Rodigan you feel has channelled all his obvious passion for both performing and music into this role. He has won Sony awards before for his shows on the dance station Kiss but his debut as a Radio 2 presenter last year, in the mix of the likes of fellow seasoned enthusiasts like Bob Harris and Janice Long, feels like a perfect home for him. Drawing on John Peel’s extensive archive of live sessions, covering everyone from Bob Marley to the Specials and UB40, Rodigan has plenty of Peel-like charm. Listening to his warm, dulcet tones and discursive story telling, mapping out the endless threads of his knowledge and passion, interspersed with vintage ska and modern reggae tunes, feels like a giant Caribbean sun shining out of the radio, burning late into the night. Rodigan says he was always inspired by DJs like Mike Raven who broadcast the first R&B show on Radio 1 in 1968, “He used to speak in this very precise and proper way, slightly over-enunciating every syllable and never missing consonants. I was absolutely enthralled by his voice. Some pirate radio DJs are so bombastic but they are forgetting they are not in a club, they are in people’s homes.”

Not that Rodigan is so polite when he plays live. With the nickname ‘Ram Jam’, Rodigan is an in-demand performer at club soundclashes where reggae DJs battle against each other, playing specially recorded versions of reggae hits that include their name. “At first I was incredibly shy on stage but I quickly realised that especially in Jamaica, you have to be able to talk to the audience or else they will start throwing things at you. I always loved to dance and I realised I had to something to say so I got more confident on stage.”

So confidant that he plays constantly around the world and carried off the reggae World Clash Cup at Easter, adding to what is fast becoming Rodigan’s golden year in which he was also awarded an MBE by the Queen. This recognition for services to music made him particularly proud, especially for the reaction it generated in Jamaica: “The response was phenomenal. Everyone was going crazy congratulating me.” You sense that the esteem he is held in Jamaica as a tireless ambassador for their music brings him the greatest pleasure. He admits that young black people in the UK no longer have the same interest in reggae as previous generations: “Reggae for them is something from the past that their grandparents like. They don’t have that connection historically or culturally with that West Indian experience anymore.”