In 1999, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton published Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. The superstar DJ was still a recent phenomenon, and the book captured this cultural shift and told the oral history of DJing up to that point. An updated edition is out this month, with a new chapter telling the story of a whole group of DJs that even this definitive history had somewhat ignored: women.
“In terms of the pioneers, it’s all men, and we can’t escape that,” Broughton says. “But with the new edition, we wanted to make sure there were more women’s voices.” These include the likes of disco-era star Sharon White, genre-fluid New Yorker Anita Sarko and drum’n’bass duo Kemistry & Storm. Another is DJ and broadcaster Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, who was initially interviewed in 1999. She says that highlighting female talent “was obviously a concern” for Brewster and Broughton back then, “but people are starting to seek out these women because their stories haven’t necessarily consciously been swept under the carpet – but they have been.”
