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The one character trait all DJs share - an innate knowledge of the music people want to hear and dance to - has meant that they've played a defining role in both the consumption and conception of most musical forms in the second half of this century. Dub, disco, hip- hop, house, techno and their many offshoots were all born of the desire to get more people on the dance floor. So Brewster and Broughton's biography of the DJ is also a sketchy history of 20th century dance music, from rock 'n' roll onwards.
The first club DJ was quite possibly a Yorkshireman who, in 1943, hired the upstairs room of pub and charged a shilling for the pleasure of listening to his Swing records. His name was Jimmy Savile. It wasn't a huge success but he had the revolutionary idea of using two record-players to cut down on the time between records.
Twenty years later, when working-class Northerners began travelling to obscure venues in Wigan and Blackpool to ingest amphetamines and dance to obscure soul records, it was the first recognisable version of today's club culture. The Northern Soul DJs were the first to attract loyal crowds, and because they played the rarest Sixties American soul and pop, music that had failed in its own time and place, Northern Soul was responsible for...