“These British music-mag writers deliver the goods with humor and a basic sense of good storytelling.”—Vibe

“Brewster and Broughton exhibit considerable skill in rendering the meta-story seamless, subtly turning what is essentially an oral history, culled from original interviews and other published sources, into an orchestral piece.”—Hartford Courant

“Like an inspired set on the wheels of steel, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life fashions a vast array of emotions, ideas, and history in[to] an extended yet entertaining program. The authors condense a century’s worth of highlights, beginning with a 1906 radio broadcast, into a tome that leaves the reader feeling like a spent dancer: uplifted, and a little overwhelmed, yet not utterly exhausted. . . . This extremely well-researched work is not only comprehensive, it’s also comprehensible. . . . Briskly paced yet thorough . . . The section on Northern Soul contextualizes this uniquely English scene for clueless Yanks superbly. . . . Ultimately, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life does what any successful music book should: It compels the reader to slap the music in question—presented in an appendix of historical playlists—on the stereo. . . . The authors clearly love their subject matter, framing meticulous facts and disparate stories with very visceral excitement.”—Kurt B. Reighley, Pulse! 

“Very informative . . . takes you way back into the “true roots’ of dance music and hip hop’s culture, then smoothly brings you into the future.”—Danny Tenaglia

“Exhaustive yet entertaining . . . a definitive history of the disc jockey. . . . The book lovingly captures a host of compelling stories from every seminal DJ across the last century. . . . Energy jumps from the book’s pages.”—iD

“From counterculture to mainstream leisure, the DJ has always been at the heart of clubland. . . . An illuminating, thoughtful, and insightful tome.”—Muzik

“This is for anyone who has ever found themselves lost on the dance floor.”—The Face

Because you see, DJing is not just about choosing a few tunes. It is about generating shared moods; it’s about understanding the feelings of a group of people and directing them to a better place. In the hands of a master, recorded music can create moments of communion that are the most powerful events in people’s lives.

This idea of communion is what drives the best musical happenings. It’s about breaking the audience/artist boundary, about being an event, not just watching one. The hippies in San Francisco knew this when they made the early psychedelic rock shows places to dance. Sid Vicious knew it when he jumped off the stage to watch the Sex Pistols. It’s the answer to the Happy Mondays’ question, “What’s Bez for?” And it’s why the twist caused such a dancing revolution: without the worry of having a partner, you were free to be part of the whole room.

The DJ stands at the apex of this idea. If a DJ does their job right, they’re down there jumping around in the middle of the dancefloor, even when they’re actually locked away behind a lot of electronics in a gloomy glass box.

The Lord of the Dance

The disc jockey is simply the latest incarnation of an ancient role. As party-starter par excellence, the DJ has many illustrious forebears. The shamans were his most resonant ancestors (as no end of misty mystical ravers will tell you); pagan high priests who directed their people by dance to the spirit world and drank drug-filled reindeer piss in order to meet their gods. Since then, the DJ has taken many names in many places: the music hall’s loquacious Master of Ceremonies, the jazz age’s zoot-suited bandleader, the wrinkled Blue Mountain square dance caller, even perhaps the conductor of symphonies and opera. For most of our time on the planet, the role was taken by a religious figure. Most older forms of worship are centered around music and dance, their rituals usually focused on some special person who links heaven and earth.

In fact, only recently was dancing ever separated from religion. The Bible tells us that “there is a time to dance.” The Talmud says the angels dance in heaven. It is a commandment by rabbinical law that Jews must dance at weddings, and the Orthodox Hasidim are instructed to dance as an important part of their regular worship. The Shakers, a nonconformist sect famous for their furniture, lived as celibates with the sexes completely segregated (they expanded by adopting orphans), but their men and women came together to dance in intricate formations as an act of worship.

In calling for a greater sense of festivity in the Christian church, sixties theologian Harvey Cox pointed out very sagely that “some who cannot say a prayer may be able to dance it.” Nevertheless, modern religion has often had problems with dancing, usually because of its obvious connection with sex—“the perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire,” as George Bernard Shaw put it. But people will dance regardless. Islam is fairly unhappy about dancing, but Turkey’s cult of whirling dervishes do it to praise Allah. Christianity has regularly outlawed it, only to see outbreaks of dance-desperate people sneaking in a few steps when they can. In Germany in 1374, after eating some ergot-poisoned bread, great crowds of half-naked people thronged in the streets and did exactly what the church had told them not to: they danced like maniacs. As historian of religious dance E. R. Dodds wrote, “The power of the Dance is a dangerous power. Like other forms of self-surrender, it is easier to begin than to stop.”

All this is the DJ’s heritage and power source. The DJ is today’s lord of the dance.

If you think it’s a bit rich to put disc jockeys in such exalted company, consider the status our culture awards them. In the ultralounges of Vegas a top spinner can earn six-figure sums for a few hours’ work. DJs have become millionaires, dated actors and superstars, flown between engagements in helicopters and private jets. All this for doing something which is so much fun, as they’ll openly admit, that most DJs would do it for free.

If that doesn’t convince you, you’d better have a word with the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who are involved in the multi-billion-dollar nightclub economy, and certainly the millions of clubbers who dig into their pockets every week to hear the DJ play. In the words of disco-loving Albert Goldman, one of the few writers to understand dance music: “Never, in the long history of public entertainment, have so many paid so much for so little—and enjoyed themselves so immensely!”

So that’s why the disc jockey deserves his own history. Even if he’s mostly a grumpy, anal retentive who makes a living playing other people’s music.

What a DJ Actually Does

“Anyone who can play chopsticks on the piano and knows how to work a Game Boy can be a DJ,” wrote Gavin Hills when The Face sent him to DJ school for the day. “All you need is some sense of timing and a few basic technical skills and you too could be on a grand a night.”

Is it really that easy, or do DJs come anywhere near earning a living?

What exactly does a DJ do?

DJs distill musical greatness. They select a series of exceptional recordings and use them to create a unique performance, improvised to precisely suit the time, the place and the people in front of them. All this looks very much like someone just putting on a few tunes, and, given an afternoon’s introduction to the equipment, the “anyone could do that” argument seems strong. And we can’t deny that the greatness in the music is the work of the producer and the musicians who made each track. But answer this: how did those spectacular records get into that DJ’s collection? Where did they find the amazing funk version of that familiar Beatles tune? What was that sixties soul thing with the bassline that turned the dancers to jelly? Or that house tune that sounds like the Doors? Or that garage track that’s better than anything I’ve heard in a year of listening to Soundcloud?

A DJ’s job is to know music. The DJ knows music better than you, better than your friends, better than everyone on the dancefloor or in the record shop. Some DJs know their chosen genre better than anyone else on the planet. Sure, anyone can put on a big playlist, but most people only have tunes we’ve all heard before, songs everyone’s bored with. A great DJ will hit a room with musical moments so new and fresh that it’s irrelevant that the music is recorded, and so powerful they surpass your all-time favorites (and here “fresh” can mean an old song rescued from complete obscurity as easily as a track produced yesterday). The real work of a DJ isn’t standing behind the decks for a couple of hours, looking shifty and waiting for drink tickets; the time and effort comes in a life spent sifting through music and deciding if it’s good, bad or “Oh-my-god-listen-to-this!” A DJ’s job is to channel the vast ocean of recorded sound into a single unforgettable evening.

Naturally, few DJs are anything less than obsessive about their music collections. In The Recording Angel, Evan Eisenberg tells of Clarence, the heir to a Cadillac salesman’s fortune, who sits in poverty in Long Island with an unimaginably vast collection of records. His toilet has stopped working, he can hardly afford to feed himself, but he still collects music obsessively. “Clarence opens the door and you enter, but just barely. Every surface—the counters and cabinets, the shelves of the oven and refrigerator, and almost all the linoleum floor—is covered with records. All he had left was the house—unheated, unlit, so crammed with trash that the door wouldn’t open—and three quarters of a million records . . .”

It’s not fiction.

To become a good DJ you have to develop the hunger. You have to search for new music with the zeal of a gold rush prospector digging in a blizzard. You shouldn’t be able to walk past a charity shop without worrying about the amazing vinyl rarities that might be nestling among those Spice Girls LPs. Even in our digital age, collecting—and the obsessive curiosity that goes with it—is a vital part of DJing. Scouring playlists and tracklistings for gems to steal, dissecting other DJs’ mixes, hitting Shazam in taxis and restaurants, obsessing over new releases, poring over specialist blogs, knowing the names of obscure drummers, producers and bass players, racking up debts at Discogs and Bandcamp, trawling through dusty warehouses in search of those elusive tracks that have never been digitized. People will find you boring, your skin will suffer, but you will find solace in long, impenetrable conversations with fellow junkies about Metroplex catalogue numbers or Prelude white labels.

Presenting or Performing?

Aside from musical knowledge, and the ceaseless research and collecting that supports it, the DJ’s skill lies in sharing music effectively. At its most basic, DJing is the act of presenting a series of records for an audience’s enjoyment. A radio DJ introduces music and intersperses it with chat. However, the club DJ has largely abandoned this role for something more musically creative. Out has gone the idea of introducing records in favor of the notion of performing them. Today’s DJs use records as building blocks, interlocking them together in an improvised narrative to create a “set”—a performance—of their own. By emphasizing the connections between songs, by juxtaposing them or by seamlessly overlaying them, the modern club DJ is not so much presenting discrete records as combining them to make something new. And this kind of patchwork performance, when done well, can be very much greater than the sum of its parts. Consequently, the DJ, no longer merely the host for a revue of other people’s recordings, can be considered a performer.

The essence of the DJ’s craft is selecting which records to play and in what order. Doing this better or worse than others is the profession’s basic yardstick. The aim is to generate a cohesive musical atmosphere, in most cases to make people dance. But while it might sound simple enough, successfully programming an evening of music (or even just half an hour) is vastly harder than you might think. Try it. Even with a box full of great tunes, choosing songs to keep people dancing—holding their attention without jarring them or boring them—requires a lot of skill. For some it comes instinctively, while for others it’s experience gained from years of watching people dance.

To really pull it off you need to understand the precise effects of each track on an audience—you need to hear music in terms of its energy and feeling. All good DJs can distinguish fine nuances in music; they are sensitive to the emotions and associations each song inspires, and they know exactly how each record’s style, tempo and sonics will impact on the room. This understanding is the foundation of the DJs’ improvisation, as they choose which record to play next. This is largely about having an ear for music, about having a critical understanding of what makes one song work better than another, and particular songs sound good next to each other. Few DJs are musicians in the sense of playing an instrument, but many display a quite refined musicality.

Even at the purely technical level a DJ’s job is fairly demanding. In combining tracks to create a single, flowing, meaningful (or at least effective) performance, you need to know the structure of each of the songs you’re going to play, you must have a reasonably musical ear to hear whether two tunes are in complementary keys, and to seamlessly merge two separate tracks you need a precise sense of rhythm. To “beatmatch,” to synchronize the beats of two records, you must learn to hear two songs at once, one in each ear. This cognitive ability involves actually “rewiring” part of your brain through dogged practice. Other musicians’ skills are invaluable. Most good DJs will have a reliable musical memory and a firm understanding of song construction. And you obviously need to know the equipment involved: your decks, your mixer, your amplifier and any other sound-processing devices. A quick glance into any DJ booth will show you this can be pretty complex.

The best DJs will even play the sound system itself, using volume and frequency controls, as well as special effects like echo and reverb, to emphasize certain moments or certain instruments in a song. By “EQing” or “working the system” a good DJ can enhance even a single recording, making it more dramatic, more explosive, more danceable. And today’s advanced equipment lets DJs use studio techniques like sampling and looping a section of music, or mixing in extra beats or a bassline—in effect, remixing tracks live to create a unique version for that moment.

Most DJs who dare to play outside the security of their bedrooms will have a fairly good technical understanding. But even with a complete mastery of the practicalities you could still be a useless DJ (there are plenty). The most fundamental DJ talents are taste and enthusiasm. Taste is key: can you recognize good music, and can you separate the great from the merely good? It’s wildly subjective, but it boils down to whether a crowd of people on a dancefloor is at all interested in the same music as you.

If they are, great; but if they’re not, how far can you win them over? This is where enthusiasm comes in. The best DJs are evangelists about music. They can make their love for their favorite tracks infectious. You could play a hit record and get people to dance, but can you make your crowd love a new song they’ve never heard before? Can you make them appreciate something on the edge of their tastes by recontextualizing it and showing them how it fits with an old favorite? The greatest DJs have always been driven by a burning need to share their music. As DJ Andrew Weatherall once put it: “DJing is two hours of you showing people what’s good.”

And if it’s going well, the DJ is enjoying himself just as much as the dancers.

“Even if I wasn’t working, I’d still keep playing records,” says New York’s David Morales. “I enjoy doing what I do. I get a lot of passion from it, and to be paid, and to be put on a pedestal for doing something that I love doing naturally, is mind-boggling.”

“It’s because it’s the best feeling,” says Haçienda and Homoelectric DJ Kath McDermott. “It still feels quite naughty and exciting to me. It’s just such a fantastic feeling when you have that moment and it hits. When it goes wrong, it’s a bloody nightmare. But when it’s good, it’s absolutely fucking incredible. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop doing it.

The Art of DJing

So the DJ is part priest, part technician, part collector, part selector and part musical evangelist. Doubtless a craftsman, they are the experts at making people dance. But is the DJ an artist? Sometimes.

Popular understanding of great DJing usually concentrates on the technical aspects: super-smooth mixes, whip-fast changes, mixing on three decks clever EQing. Perhaps the busier a DJ is, the easier it is to believe they’re doing something creative. And many DJs gained their fame from doing astonishing things on the decks; just like many musicians, from Mozart to Prince, they owe their legend to a godlike mastery of their instruments.

However, a great DJ should be able to move a crowd on the most primitive equipment, and some of history’s best DJs have been pretty ropey mixers. Great DJing is not just about tricksy mixing, it’s much more about selection and sequencing—finding amazing new songs and being able to pull them out at just the right moment. More than anything else, it’s how sensitively a DJ can interact with a crowd.

The truth about DJing is that it’s an emotional, improvisational artform, and here the real scope for artistry lies. A good DJ isn’t just stringing records together; they’re controlling the relationship between some music and hundreds of people. That’s why they need to see the dancefloor. That’s why it couldn’t be a tape. That’s why it’s a live performance, a creative act. Music is a hotline to people’s emotions, and a DJ projects this power to generate energy and enjoyment. Obviously their medium is music, but that’s just a means to an end. In a very real sense, a DJ’s primary medium is emotion: the DJ plays the feelings of a roomful of people, responding to them and heightening them with music.

“It’s communication,” says DJ and producer Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim. “It’s whether they’re communicating to the crowd and whether they’re receiving the communication back from the crowd. For me, it’s whether they look up or not while they’re playing.”

“A good DJ is always looking at the crowd,” he adds, “seeing what they like, seeing whether it’s working, communicating with them, smiling at them. And a bad DJ is always looking down at the decks and just doing whatever they practiced in their bedroom, regardless of whether the crowd are enjoying it or not.”

David Mancuso, disco’s founding father, always believed firmly that a DJ is never greater than their audience. His ideal was that the DJ be performer and listener in equal parts, “a humble person, who sheds their ego and respects music, and is there to keep the flow going—to participate.” On the best nights, he said he felt like a conduit for the emotions around him, completing the circuit between the dancers and the music. “It’s a unique situation where the dancer becomes part of the whole setting of the music being played. Basically, you have one foot on the dancefloor and one in the booth.”

David Morales agrees, affirming that a DJ can only do his job properly in the presence of an audience.

“I can’t turn it on for myself,” he insists. “I can’t. I’ve got a great sounding studio, but when I make my show tapes for the radio, I can’t turn it on. I don’t come up with the creative things that come on when I’m playing live to an audience.”

However, when the live feedback is there, he knows he is capable of greatness. And when a night is going well, the feeling is incomparable.

“Ohhh, man, it’s like jumping out of my skin,” he says, beaming. “I dance in the booth. I jump up and down. I wave my arms in the air. It’s that feeling of knowing I’m in full control. I can do anything I want.”

When he’s on a roll, the feeling is completely sexual.

“Oh, for sure. For me? Absolutely. Pure sex! Classic, spiritual sex. Oh my god, on a great night, man—sometimes I’m on my knees in the middle of a mix, just feeling it that way. And then when you play the next record, you can bring it down, you can bring it up, or you can just turn everything off and the people are going nuts! And you stand back, you just wipe your forehead and . . . shit! You could play whatever you want. Whatever you want. You got ’em from there.”

Sex and DJs are rarely far apart—confirmation that the act of love and the act of getting people excited through music are close cousins. Junior Vasquez remembers some drug-crazed Sound Factory clubber dry-humping the speaker stacks in an attempt to get closer to the music. “He kept yelling, ‘I’m fucking the DJ.’”

Francis Grasso, the granddaddy of modern club jocks, was getting blowjobs in the booth back in 1969. “I bet you can’t make me miss a beat,” he’d tell the woman beneath his decks.

“I am a facilitator of debauchery,” declared Honey Dijon as she explained her sexualized philosophy of DJing. “I’m a facilitator of people’s good times, bringing people together through sound and vibration, and trying to channel shamanic ritualistic sexual energy in them.”

DJing’s Historical Maleness

It’s worth pointing out here that until very recently DJing was an almost exclusively male profession. When we refer to the DJ as “he” it is to acknowledge this overwhelming historical fact. In the first century of DJing, women were completely frozen out of the picture, with precious few exceptions. DJ skills were passed from master to apprentice in an almost Masonic manner, making it a tough clique to crack. And given much of early dance culture revolved around gay men, with women a clear minority in the important New York and Chicago clubs, it took decades for women DJs to number more than a handful, and even longer to be taken seriously. Club culture, though often sexualized, was only rarely a force for sexual equality, and the dilemma for female DJs was whether or not they should project or downplay their sex (and rarity value) to get ahead. But thankfully, by around 2015 there were finally enough respected women DJs getting work and visibility for this to cease to be an issue. We’ll trace the changes that brought this about, the obstacles that stood in their way, and highlight the brave few women DJs who held their own in that very male world.

Another theme we’ll explore is the dark fact of DJs taking advantage of their exalted position. In recent years several major DJs have been revealed as monstrous sexual predators who exploited the emotionally charged connection with their clubbers to engage in coercive behavior, sexual assault and even rape. And this includes DJs who played an important historical role. We won’t write them out of history, but we’ll make sure to call them to account.