DJ Paulette recounts how she got her first taste of working in the music business in early-nineties Manchester

It’s a balmy, Parisian evening in 2011, and I’ve been on one of my favourite walks past Père Lachaise, that grand city within a cemetery, to meet Gilles Peterson and friends at Mama Shelter. I had been living and DJ’ing in Paris for seven years and, call it loyalty or tradition, whenever Gilles was on the radio I emailed in for a shout out, and if he was in town, I made the trip to see him, Rob Gallagher, Sean Rollins and the Brownswood record label crew.

After his set at La Bellevilloise we hung out back in the hotel bar. Our group had fallen into an animated discussion about music and DJ’ing – I was telling some random story about touring in France when Gilles turned, looked at me and said, “Yeah but – do you still LOVE it?” He scrutinised my face then laughed cheekily. “You still LOVE it, don’t you! When are you going to write that book, eh? – You should read that Anthony Bourdain book – Kitchen Confidential … write something like that.”

I took the hint, bought the book, read it in a couple of days then tried to write something profound but I couldn’t find an edge. I had no heavy AAA-list names to drop because I wasn’t a regular in the green rooms that mattered. I’ve had designer handbags and underwear that have lasted longer than my longest relationships and could report only average sex with a series of low-rent, short-stay partners. I had no wild fashion stories and had taken nowhere near enough drugs to qualify as a bankable rehab rescue case.

Yet still I wrote. I showed samples of my work to a few people. Laidback Luke told me that most DJs he knew only wanted to make music and didn’t read books. It scored nul points from my Commissioning Editor friend at Random House who said that he only signed best-selling celebrity titles to his roster. [Last Night a DJ Saved My Life co-author] Frank Broughton told me that while he could see I’d got the chops to write, without the sex, drugs and rock and roll it wasn’t that interesting really. Deflated, I put my writing dreams to bed.

But Freud writes, “the repressed will always return”, and people say that everyone has one book in them. Freud is right and those pesky people have a point. So here is my story.

I’m DJ Paulette. After thirty years in the business (which is surely long enough to hope that people know that I play records in clubs for a living), I still use the “DJ” prefix as an aide memoire. Secretly, it bumps me up the listings on alphabetical order line-ups and poster credits but don’t tell anybody. Like Madonna, I’m mononymous. I only use my second name in private because it’s my surname by marriage, and since I’ve been divorced for twenty-six years there’s no point in giving that side of the story too much oxygen.

This is not a complete history of electronic dance music nor is it a definitive DJ Paulette biography: quite a few places, people and events are missing so don’t @ me. It takes a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of my DJ’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. After all, ten people at a party will never tell the same story.

It starts in Manchester in 1992 with its backdrop of the Aids crisis, Section 28, recession, the Poll Tax, the backdraft from the SUS laws, Tim Berners Lee’s introduction of the World Wide Web and the completion of the Channel Tunnel; it finishes somewhere in the present after Little Simz and Kendrick Lamar headlined and closed Glastonbury Festival, after we celebrated fifty years of London Pride, stuck a pin in the moment when Beyoncé’s global number one album Renaissance dropped to save house music and we lost Queen Elizabeth II (RIP).

I have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outsider knowledge: opinions and views are my own. The themes, situations and issues have been put into context with the pivotal people I have worked with, for and alongside. These are power-players and decision-makers who were there from the start, who are important contributors today, and who are taking the music industry future forwards to create a diverse and more robust place for us all to work and enjoy without prejudice. I stitch this patchwork together with a little history, some socio-cultural commentary, a splash of politics, and a lot of love. It’s a living history; we still have miles to go before we sleep.

Before I became a DJ, I got my first taste of working in the music industry when I was eighteen years old. My Calvin Klein Obsession-soaked application worked, and I was called up to audition as an on-air reporter for the new youth magazine programme called Saturday Express on Piccadilly Radio 261. It was to be broadcast every Saturday morning hosted by presenters Becky Want and an eighteen-year-old Chris Evans.

Working in the studios, watching the presenters, learning to record interviews with a Marantz and edit on a Studer A820 with a white chinagraph “grease” pencil and a razor blade, reviewing the singles and meeting the stars gave me the bug for doing something music-industry related with my life.

By day, I was employed day, I was employed as an (unwelcomed and largely unsupervised) management trainee, based at the Cooperative Wholesale Society Travel and Banking Group, but at the weekends and by night I was moonlighting, recording the club/gig reviews and random reports that I’d pitched and managed to land with Chris Whatmough and John Clayton. I hated my day job, but I loved working for Piccadilly Radio 261.

Reporting for Saturday Express gave me a pass into one of the best clubs in the world. I called the Haçienda head office and told them that I was a journalist working on a story about nightlife for the Manchester Evening News and Piccadilly Radio. It was a total blag but it worked. Guest list for me and five friends with free drinks? Sorted. Access to the DJ and VJ booth with interview time set aside? Sorted. Lifetime VIP membership for me? Sorted.

Once my friends had drunk all the free drinks and were happy dancing I disappeared upstairs. I spent the rest of the evening watching the visuals and the dancefloor from above and bouncing between the DJ booth and the VJ booth where I chatted with the filmmaker Dani Jacobs next door.

Back at Piccadilly 261, as brilliant as I thought my feature was, it was considered too grown-up for Saturday Express, so they canned it. Their loss. My gain.

Music, clubs and entertaining people has been my happy place since my mum, Blanche, went into labour with me and my twin while she was singing onstage at the Free Trade Hall (as family legend goes). I was fifteen when I started clubbing, using my sisters’ birth certificates on rotation for ID to gain membership to clubs like PiPs, DeVilles, Rotters and The Ritz. When I had my eighteenth birthday at Berlin Nightclub on Deansgate I’d already been a regular there for two years. I was always able to talk my way into anywhere and I was so keen and affable that the security waved me through without the need for payment.

Later years saw me singing in bands and recording studios as a lead and backing singer in hype spots like Out of the Blue, Spirit and Roger Boden’s “The Cottage”. I was a second lead singer for a band called Bernie Hot Hot, and we performed live at the International I and II supporting Curtis Mayfield and Deacon Blue on separate occasions.

A few years later I recorded backing vocals for a band called KAOS, performing showcases at Metropolis and SARM West in London. I wrote my own music for a while, remaining unsigned and unpublished before returning to my academic path when I was accepted for an English Literature degree at Manchester Polytechnic in 1991. Not long after that everything went wrong, and I became a DJ.

This is an extract from Welcome to the Club: The Life and Lessons of a Black Woman DJ by DJ Paulette (Manchester University Press). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

DJ Paulette is speaking at the 2024 Idler Festival.

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