Content area
Full Text
WHEN would you say the Disc Jockey first appeared on Planet Entertainment? The Fifities, perhaps, born alongside the rock'n'roll music he - it is still usually a he - was destined to promote? Or maybe it was a wartime thing when it was hard to get hold of live bands and people started playing records to entertain people? Actually, that's not a bad guess - the discothque was invented in wartime Paris, hence the French name. In the UK, it was Jimmy Savile, as he then was, who hired a room and played a few records for paying customers in 1943. But the first person to play recorded music to entertain a group of people was an American wireless telegraphy engineer called Reginald Fessenden who played a record of Handel's Largo, probably sung by Clara Butt, though no-one is quite sure, over a link which normally only transmitted in code, from Boston, Mass, to a number of very surprised wireless operators on ships in the North Atlantic, way back in 1906.
"It all started on Christmas Eve, 1906," says Frank Broughton. "We made this amazing discovery in an obscure American book about the history of radio where somebody had actually recorded that this guy, Reginald Fessenden, had been the first person to play a record on the radio. In our eyes, that made him the first DJ."
Broughton and his co-writer, Bill Brewster, are not radio buffs or recording anoraks. They are veterans of the modern club scene, a entire culture with the DJ, rather than the music he plays at the apex. When they met in New York, they decided to chronicle the city's club scene. "In New York there is...