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Brewster & Broughton — Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

Cited in 4 notes
Dance, Lawrence — Love Saves the Day, The Loft, The transatlantic feedback loop

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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)

The title is a record — Indeep’s “Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life” (1982) — and the book asks the title’s claim to be taken literally.1 Two dance-music journalists who met in New York in the mid-1990s at Mixmag’s American offshoot wrote the first comprehensive history of the disc jockey, opening in 1906 with radio’s first broadcast of recorded music and arguing that the figure at the turntables has been popular music’s unsung author ever since: “the DJ plays the feelings of a roomful of people,” and the job “is to channel the vast ocean of recorded sound into a single unforgettable evening.”2 Broughton later compressed the whole thesis into one sentence of courtship: “you’ve got this love affair between the DJ and the dance floor. When the dance floor gets a bit bored, the DJ has to try some new tricks to win back its affections.”3 The tricks, chapter by chapter, turn out to be the genres.

The book’s structure is the argument repeated across scenes: northern soul’s amphetamine all-nighters, where rare American soul 45s made the DJ a record-hunter before disco existed; Kingston’s sound systems, whose toasting and versioning crossed to the Bronx; and the night in August 1973 when DJ Kool Herc, interviewed by the authors in 1998, doubled the drum breaks at his sister’s back-to-school party — “I said let me put a couple of these records together, that got breaks in them… Place went berserk” — and named the technique the Merry Go Round.4 The disco chapters run the same story through Francis Grasso’s Sanctuary and David Mancuso’s Loft, and the authors’ stated ambition was rehabilitation: putting disco back at the heart of dance-music history a generation after the backlash.5 The book also polices its own myths, publicly. Its first edition printed Jimmy Savile’s claim to have invented twin-turntable DJing in 1946 as “the fundamental technical advance on which modern club DJing is based”; the 2006 edition deleted the sentence after the authors re-reported it against documented earlier claimants, and the 2022 edition (which added a foreword by James Murphy and a new chapter on the women DJs the earlier editions had thinly served) revised the Savile material again.6 A history that corrects itself in print, twice, is rarer than it should be.

Run the argument through The transatlantic feedback loop and the book supplies the loop’s missing dance-floor chapters. Northern soul is the loop at its strangest: Detroit and Chicago B-sides that failed at home became liturgy in Lancashire ballrooms a decade later, the DJ’s crate replacing the British band as the Atlantic’s return vessel. The acid house chapters close the circuit: Chicago and Detroit records igniting London and Ibiza in 1987–88, before the superstar DJ was sold back to America. The push-back writes itself from the book’s own revisions: this is history through the booth’s window, a great-man story in which every genre gets an auteur, and the dancers, hosts, and rooms — the counterweight Tim Lawrence’s floor-side history insists on — stay mostly in soft focus, as did the women behind the decks until the authors themselves added the chapter in 2022.7 The standing is settled regardless: the Observer ranked it among the greatest music books, Gilles Peterson’s blurb calls it “The original and still the best,” and its interview archive grew into DJhistory.com, the trade’s collective memory.8

Key contributions

  • The DJ as author: the first full-length case that the person selecting and combining records is a creative figure on the order of the musicians being played.
  • The genre-birth pattern: northern soul, reggae, disco, hip hop, house, and techno each traced to a DJ working a specific floor — the same event, re-staged across three decades and two continents.
  • The primary-interview archive: Herc, Grasso, Mancuso, and dozens more on tape before many of them died, later seeded into DJhistory.com.
  • The transatlantic wiring: Kingston to the Bronx, Detroit to Wigan, Chicago to Ibiza — dance music’s circulatory system mapped through the people carrying the records.
  • The self-correcting record: the deleted Savile claim and the 2022 women’s chapter — a standard history willing to retract its own founding anecdote.

See also

  • Love Saves the Day — the scholarly counterpart, floor-side where this book is booth-side: Lawrence’s host and room against Brewster and Broughton’s auteur
  • The songwriter-performer divide — the book adds a third figure to the divide’s two: the DJ, an author who neither writes nor performs the record yet decides what it means on a floor

Footnotes

  1. Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life, Wikipedia (accessed July 5, 2026) — Michael Cleveland’s song, Indeep, 1982, No. 10 R&B; the book’s title source per Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (book), Wikipedia (accessed July 5, 2026). ↩

  2. Grove Atlantic, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (accessed July 5, 2026) — first published by Headline, London, 1999; the two quoted lines are the book’s, as collected on its Goodreads quotes page (accessed July 5, 2026; no page numbers given there). ↩

  3. An oral history of DJhistory.com, Red Bull Music Academy Daily, January 2016 (accessed July 5, 2026) — Broughton’s words, with the authors’ account of meeting at Mixmag’s Update USA in New York. ↩

  4. Kool Herc gave hip hop its break, DJ History, July 27, 2023 (accessed July 5, 2026) — Broughton’s September 30, 1998 interview with Herc, conducted for the book; the quotes are Herc’s verbatim, including the door prices at the 1520 Sedgwick Avenue party and the Merry Go Round naming. ↩

  5. Bill Brewster on Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Velocity Press, 2022 (accessed July 5, 2026) — the disco chapters as the book’s heart and the rehabilitation aim; Grasso’s interview is held at Rock’s Backpages (accessed July 5, 2026). ↩

  6. Greg Wilson, “Jimmy Savile — DJ Originator Or More Smoke And Mirrors?”, November 2012 (accessed July 5, 2026) — quotes the 1999 first edition’s sentence and documents its deletion from the 2006 edition, alongside earlier twin-turntable claimants; the 2022 White Rabbit edition’s additions (women’s chapter, Murphy foreword, revised Savile sections) per Velocity Press (accessed July 5, 2026). ↩

  7. The 2022 women’s chapter and its framing per Velocity Press (accessed July 5, 2026); an extract, on the Saint’s Sharon White, ran at Caught by the River, May 2022 (accessed July 5, 2026). ↩

  8. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (book), Wikipedia (accessed July 5, 2026) — the Observer’s 2006 greatest-music-books listing (No. 45); blurbs per Grove Atlantic (accessed July 5, 2026); DJhistory.com (accessed July 5, 2026). ↩