Brewster & Broughton — Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

Author: Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton
Title: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey
Year: 1999
Type: Book (Headline; Grove Press)

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey is a book by the journalists Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, first published by Headline in 1999 and later by Grove Press in the United States. It treats the disc jockey as an unsung hero of popular music and an artist in their own right, beginning with a radio broadcast of records in 1906, and it follows the DJ through northern soul, reggae, disco, hip hop, house and techno. The evidence is a history of those scenes built on the authors’ interviews with DJs, among them DJ Kool Herc, and the authors wrote it in part to put disco back at the heart of dance-music culture. The Observer ranked it No. 45 among the greatest music books in 2006, and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem said it changed the course of his musical life. The 2006 edition deleted the first edition’s sentence crediting Jimmy Savile with inventing twin-turntable DJing, and the 2022 edition added a chapter on women DJs.

Headline published the book in 1999, and Grove Press later published it in the United States.¹ Brewster and Broughton met in New York in the mid-1990s at the magazine Update USA, where Brewster became Broughton’s editor.² The book begins with a radio broadcast of records in 1906 and treats the DJ as an unsung hero of popular music and an artist in their own right, whose work, in the authors’ words, is to play “the feelings of a roomful of people.”³ Broughton later described the argument as a relationship between the DJ and the dance floor, in which the DJ must find new tricks whenever the floor grows bored.² The title is taken from Indeep’s “Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life” (1982).⁴

The chapters follow the DJ through scenes in Britain, Jamaica and the United States, from northern soul to reggae and disco. Kurt B. Reighley, reviewing it in Pulse!, called northern soul a uniquely English scene, and Grove Press’s description of the current edition lists the births of disco, hip hop, house, techno and EDM among its subjects.⁵ For the book, Broughton interviewed Kool Herc in 1998. In that interview Herc described how he began to put together records “that got breaks in them,” a technique he called the Merry Go Round.⁶ Brewster said the authors wanted to put disco back at the heart of dance-music culture because it had been written about so disparagingly.⁷

The Observer ranked the book No. 45 in its 2006 list of the greatest music books.⁸ Salon wrote that the radio DJs and Paris discos it describes “established the themes that would play out in hip-hop, disco and rave culture.”⁹ Murphy told Brewster that the book had changed the course of his musical life, and he wrote the foreword to the 2022 edition.⁷ The authors’ interviews became the basis of their website, DJhistory.com.¹⁰

The first edition credited Jimmy Savile with inventing twin-turntable DJing in 1946, calling it “the fundamental technical advance on which modern club DJing is based.” The 2006 edition deleted that sentence, and the DJ Greg Wilson has documented earlier claimants to the technique.¹¹ The 2022 edition rewrote the Savile passages again and added a chapter on women DJs, a chapter on jazz-funk and about fifty new interviews.⁷ Brewster said the authors were conscious that the book was “very male” and wanted to even it out. He added that much of the history took place in gay men’s clubs with almost no women.⁷

Key contributions

• The DJ as a creative figure in popular music, from a radio broadcast of 1906 onward.
• The origins of dance scenes traced through the DJs who played for them: northern soul, reggae, disco, hip hop, house and techno.
• A body of interviews with DJs, among them Kool Herc, later the basis of DJhistory.com.
• A history of disco written, in Brewster’s words, “to put disco back at the heart of dance music culture.”

See also

• Love Saves the Day — Tim Lawrence’s 2003 history of New York dance music in the 1970s
• The Underground Is Massive — Michaelangelo Matos’s 2015 history of American rave
• Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor — Lawrence’s 2016 history of New York dance music from 1980 to 1983
• The transatlantic feedback loop — music crossing between Britain and the United States