We look back on the equipment, techniques, and innovations that shaped the most important decade in DJ culture.
Speaking to David Morales for this piece, I asked about the technical challenges DJs faced back in the 1970s. “If you never had a dishwasher, then you’d keep washing dishes by hand,” he said.
David’s broader point was that yes, relative to modern DJ gear and the knowledge we now have, there were obstacles. But the DJs of the day didn’t know any different; they were just doing the best they could with what they had. Given that this generation of DJs built most of the foundations for the craft and culture as we know it today, it’s fair to say they did alright.
How did the art of mixing evolve from such basic equipment? Who were the influential DJs who blazed the trail? And why were most DJs considered as nobodies in the 70s?
These are a few of the questions we’ll be exploring, with the help of some DJs who got their start in the 1970s.
Our story will focus on New York, where an incredible explosion of creativity gave the world disco and hip-hop, sounds with DJs at their core. But we’ll also hear about the pockets of activity in Italy and the UK, countries that would go on to help lead the way in the development of DJing and club music.
DJs in the 1970s weren’t drawing from the rich history that we can now reflect on, but there were still important figures who preceded them. The term “disc jockey” was coined in 1935 by the radio commentator Walter Winchell to describe Martin Block, the first radio announcer who became widely known for playing popular music. By the 1960s, a small number of DJs in Kingston, Jamaica, and in New York City had started to mix records in a way that we would now recognise, while DJs known for their collections of rare records featured prominently in the Northern Soul and “popcorn” scenes in England and Belgium respectively.
But it was in the 1970s that the modern era of DJing had its big bang, a development that would have been difficult to predict at the beginning of the decade…
The top tier of DJs today are global stars worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But for their forerunners in the 1970s, the reality could not have been more different.
“The bartender, the waiter, the cashier and the one who played records were all considered the same,” said Daniele Baldelli, the Italian DJ who helped lay the foundations for the country’s dance scene. “I started in 1969 when I was 17, at the Tana Club in Cattolica. I don’t remember being called a DJ. I was simply the guy who put records on one after the other… There were no headphones or monitors, and the selection of records was prepared by the owner of the club.”
“The DJ wasn’t important,” said David Morales, the New York DJ and producer who began attending clubs as a teenager in the ‘70s. “No one needed to see you. You were in a corner somewhere.”
“We didn’t have no jobs,” said Grand Wizzard Theodore, the inventor of scratch DJing and a hip-hop pioneer. “To go out and buy two turntables and a mixer back then, that was a lot of money. A lot of us were still living with our parents, single-parent homes, on welfare or food stamps. That’s what was going on in the South Bronx.”
“When I started DJing in 1971 I didn’t take it so seriously, I was just having a great time and getting paid for it,” said Danny Krivit, the New York DJ and producer who’d later co-found the influential Body & Soul party. “In the early ‘70s if I made $25 cash that seemed like great money for such a fun job.”
Bill Brewster, the UK DJ who co-wrote Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and co-founded DJ.History.com, described how he’d even look down upon DJs back then. “When I was a teenager in the ’70s, some DJs were called ‘wally DJs’—basically mobile DJs who showed up at your mum’s birthday, weddings, or any kind of function in a church hall… They’d play the hits of the day, whatever was in the charts.”
DJs worked in clubs, discotheques, and at private events, and many were part-time. By the start of the ‘70s, the mobile DJ model—whereby the DJ would own their own sound, light, and equipment—had been established for some years, and, along with radio DJs, this was the image that much of the general public had of the profession. Although they were a part of the soundsystem lineage that came from Jamaica, in a sense the early hip-hop crews, who set up their own speakers and so on for block parties, worked in a similar vein as mobile DJs.
There was basically no purpose-built equipment for DJs at the start of the ‘70s. “The first mixers were very rudimentary,” said Brewster. Belt-driven turntables designed for home hi-fi use were the norm, although popular models from Thorens did at least have a +/- 3% pitch adjustment. “The decks DJs were using would slip, so even though they had variable speed, it was very hard to mix on them,” said Brewster. “You’d get the mix in, touch the side, and the record would literally stop and you’d lose the beat. They were really, really hard to mix on.”
There was no such thing as cueing systems at the start of the ‘70s, so DJs had no use for headphones. “We were like the Flintstones,” quipped Theodore.
But despite these tough conditions, the early explorers of DJ technique were still able to achieve incredible things.
With the art of DJing in such an embryonic state, the ideas of single, inspired individuals could be enormously influential. News wouldn’t necessarily travel quickly, but if a DJ in a city like New York was doing something new and interesting, word would spread soon enough.
“In terms of the DJ skill set, that started in the early-to-mid 1960s with a guy called Terry Noel,” said Bill Brewster. “He was the first person to mix records together, and this was in New York. He was mixing pop records. Terry Noel was like a musical waiter—he was basically serving up music that people knew and wanted. What was significant about the person who came after him, Francis Grasso, is the idea of blending records together and presenting it as a performance. He was really the first person to do that. He was essentially imposing his taste on the audience in a way that we would recognise today.”
“Francis Grasso was the first guy to really ‘disco DJ,’” said the foundational disco producer Tom Moulton in the BBC’s 2024 documentary Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. “When he played he went from one [track] to the other, it was so smooth, so that when one record was fading out, this other one would come up but it would have the exact same beat.” Improbably, Grasso was able to pull this off without even using a headphone cueing system. He’d memorize his cue points by eye and drop the needle onto the spot he wanted.
Meanwhile, at a party that would come to be known as the Loft, a DJ named David Mancuso was busy creating a blueprint for club culture. Beginning on February 14th, 1970, he threw legendary invite-only events at his Manhattan home that would influence pretty much every significant disco DJ, party, and club in New York that came after him.
“I would consider David Mancuso the father of clubbing, because he created an atmosphere within an environment that would blow your mind while dancing,” said Nicky Siano, another foundational figure in the disco scene, said in the BBC film.
“David Mancuso was by far my favorite,” said Danny Krivit. “He didn’t beat mix, but he had clearly the best soundsystem and his programming was impeccable… He controlled the vibe and the party like no other.”
“Mancuso was probably the first DJ to be known,” said David Morales, “but not to the public, only to other DJs or people in that scene. He was a hi-fi fanatic, and his soundsystem was incredibly expensive, built for pure audio quality… The party was about freedom and community.”
Nicky Siano’s time spent dancing at the Loft inspired him to begin the Gallery in February 1973, perhaps the first public manifestation of what David Mancuso had created. “David’s place was his house, and you can’t ever recreate that in a club,” Siano later said. “Ours was like a club version of David’s… a more commercial kind of version. That feeling, that atmosphere was there. The caring about people and stuff like that. David [was more] underground. I mean, when I played a record, it was played everywhere.”
Krivit also said that he considers Richie Pampinella, who played at a venue called Hippopotamus, and David Rodriguez, the DJ at Limelight (“7th Ave”) as being among the first wave of influential and technically skilled DJs.
By the middle of the decade, the innovations in New York had begun to reach DJs in other parts of the world. “In 1975, Baia degli Angeli opened in Gabicce, and there were two American guys there, Bob Day and Tom Sison,” said Daniele. “They had two Thorens turntables at their disposal, with a speed regulation of plus or minus 3%. They removed the rubber from the turntable and put a 45 RPM with a paper cover, and on top they put a 12 inch, thus obtaining what later became the slipmat. So you could stop the record with your fingers and launch it at the right moment to create a mix.”
Meanwhile in the Bronx, a DJ named Kool Herc threw a party on August 11th, 1973 that would change the world. This is the day many people consider to be the birth of hip-hop. Herc showcased a new DJ technique he’d been working on that involved cutting between the drum breaks of two copies of the same funk record.
Earlier in the decade, Herc noticed that dancers were responding best to the stripped-back, percussion-heavy drum sections of the records he was playing. He began isolating these “breaks,” or “break beats,” and cutting between two copies of the same record to create an extended loop, a technique he called the “merry-go-round,” which was inspired by the battles he’d seen in Jamaica between dub DJs.
In the years following Herc’s big breakthrough, Theodore described being part of a highly competitive network of DJ crews across the Bronx that would be fully responsible for producing their events. “It was like a business,” he said. “We had to make the flyers, give out the flyers. We had to make sure we had the right equipment. We had to call a friend that had a van, and we had to put our stuff in the van and transport the equipment to and from the venue. We had to pay for our own security. We had to pay for the venue.”
Each crew would try to develop a unique selling point. Herc was known for having the most powerful soundsystem. Other crews would be known for their selections of music. In Theodore’s case, he wasn’t even yet in his teens, so people would come out especially to see the kid who could scratch and needle drop—“‘We gotta come see this 12, 13, year-old kid and find out what everybody’s talking about,’” as he put it.
The story of Theodore inventing the scratch has been told countless times throughout the decades, but it bears repeating. “I used to come home from school, practice and try to get new ideas,” he told DJ History in 1998. “This particular day I was playing music a little bit too loud. And my mom comes and says, ‘If you don’t turn that music down!’ My earphones were still on and while she was cursing me out in the doorway, I was still holding the record and my hand was going like this [back and forth] with the record. And when she left I was like, ‘What is this?’ So I studied it and studied it and studied it for a couple of months, until I actually figured out what I wanted to do with it. Then that’s when it became a scratch.”
Theodore himself had been inspired to DJ by his brother, Mean Gene, who’d been collaborating with one of the key pioneers of hip-hop DJ technique: Grandmaster Flash. Where Herc and other DJs cued their records from the faint sound of the needle or by looking at the grooves in the vinyl, Flash built a cue switch for the mixer, enabling him to accurately spin back the record to the beginning of a break in his headphones, something he called the “quick-mix theory” or “backspin technique.”
“When Grandmaster Flash was inventing all of his hip-hop trickery, he was doing it without realising there were already mixers on the market,” said Bill Brewster. “He was essentially making his own version, because he didn’t know they existed.
“What Grand Wizzard Theodore was amazing. But I think out of all the hip-hop people, Grandmaster Flash… took the conceptual idea of what Kool Herc was doing, but Herc wasn’t beat-matching. Flash saw that this could be great if everything could be beat-matched.
His skill in creating that was really the foundation of hip-hop. The idea that he was beat-matching tracks together, that must have been mind-blowing to see.
“When I first heard it on The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, I didn’t even understand what it was. I didn’t realise it was a DJ. I just thought it was something done in a studio. I didn’t realise until sometime later that he’d actually done that live in the studio, recreating what he did in his sets. There was no trickery, just his own skill set. That was absolutely mind-blowing.”
Whether it was in the Bronx, Manhattan or further afield, the ‘70s were the decade in which DJing expanded from simply putting on records into a set of distinct techniques that still define much of the craft today.
Early in my interview with Morales, he gave an extended response to how the overall DJ and dance floor experience differed back in the 1970s to how it is now. He did such a nice job of setting the scene that it felt appropriate to give you his words almost in full.
“The music was different, the audience was different, and the business side of the culture was different from what it is today,” he said. “People today wouldn’t necessarily understand that.
“Every DJ who played at a club was the resident, no matter how many nights a week the place was open, and they played the whole night. There were no promoters. It was just the owner of the club and the DJ. That was it.
“People lined up for the club because of the club, not because of a personality or a specific DJ. Good music was still a requirement, of course, but back then everybody played the same music, it was just whatever was popular at the time. You played what was on the radio. There was no such thing as underground. So everybody knew the records. The difference between one DJ and another—and this still holds true today—was programming and selection.
“Back then, men would ask women to dance. You had couples on the dance floor, whether gay or straight. People danced with each other, looking at each other. Today you mostly have individuals, and only in the gay clubs do they focus less on the DJ as a personality. They go for the DJ in a way, but more for the music—and there are no cameras.
“When a club opened, the DJ told a story. You started mellow. People walked in, relaxed. You didn’t rush them to the dance floor, it was more, ‘Let’s go to the bar.’ As things warmed up and people had been there a while, the DJ built the night. He knew what to play to bring people onto the dance floor.
“Back then, you had different tempos of music, and a lot of hit records were at different speeds. Today it’s often bang, bang, bang, all the way through. Back then you might have records at 90 BPM, 100, 102, 105, 113. Radio dominated what was played in the clubs and bars, but the variation in tempo gave you room to shape the night.
“You had to bring it down sometimes, because you couldn’t keep it at a peak. Bringing it down is how the bar made money. When the energy dropped, someone would say, ‘Let’s get a drink.’ There was no bottle service, no tables, so people went to the bar, socialised, talked, and had a drink.
“Then you’d bring it back up. A good DJ knew some people would leave the floor, and that was fine as long as you didn’t clear it completely. At the end of the day, the business depended on keeping people in the venue as long as possible.
“So the thing was, you didn’t worry about someone walking off your dance floor. The same went for when you played a new record—you knew you had to break it. When you played that new track, you’d probably clear the floor because nobody knew it yet and the radio hadn’t played it. In the average bar or commercial club at the time, doors opened at 10 PM and most closed at 4 or 4:30, sometimes 5 AM. That gave you six hours to break a record, so you played it more than once.
“The first time you played it, maybe 20% of the people would dance, depending on the size of the crowd. Play it again and, if it was a good track, you might get 30%. Then it could go up to 50%. If you played it six or seven times in a night, by the after-hours session you could spin it 10 times.
“By the following week, that record was big in the club. In fact, people would be coming in looking for it. Back then, a lot of the records we played came as exclusive promos from the labels, and some of those wouldn’t be released for another month or two.
“If you got an acetate, that record might not come out for another six months. People would go to the club just to hear it, ‘Man, play this record!’ That was the big thing. This was more in the underground clubs, places like the Paradise Garage or Better Days. People went because they couldn’t wait to hear that record, and they couldn’t get it on the radio.”
There’s a popular meme in DJ communities that says something like, “Everyone is a DJ until you put this in front of them” and there’ll be a photo of, say, a pair of battered turntables or some old CD decks. If you started DJing in the early ‘70s, you could have a field day with this meme, not only because of how basic the equipment was back then, but also because you’d be playing with a music format that was very much not designed for DJ use.
7-inch, 45 RPM singles, or “45s” as they were known, were the DJ’s currency in those days, and their drawbacks were manifold. These lightweight discs, designed for consumer and radio play, could only hold three to four minutes of music, leaving no space for extended breaks, intros or outros. The audio had a restricted dynamic range due to the 45’s narrow grooves, meaning that mastering engineers would remove bass to prevent the turntable’s needle from skipping. 45s were also fragile and prone to warping and wearing. Put all of this together and DJing amounted to a tightrope walk.
The flipside was that 45s were relatively cheap, widely available, and easier to carry than the 12-inch records that came after them. “In the Bronx it’s like you could find a liquor store, a Chinese restaurant, a bodega, then a record shop,” remembers Thedore. “So we were able to go and buy records all over the place.”
“You had your mom-and-pop stores—small, independent shops—and your average store mostly sold big radio hits,” said Morales.
“In the early years I bought records in a small shop in Cattolica that sold refrigerators, toasters, lamps and even 45s,” said Daniele Baldelli. “Yes, I played almost exclusively 45s.”
But beyond mainstream releases, demand began to grow for specialist music and shops that catered to DJs and record collectors. “There were these people who went to the Loft regularly, and they brought what were considered ‘Loft records’—the kind of tracks they played there,” said Morales. “None of them were commercial hits.
“I remember thinking, ‘Where do you even buy this music?’ That’s when I learned about imports and special 12-inch promos—records that were limited releases and often only available at certain stores… Some of those records could cost $50 or $75 each.”
In 1974, the mastering engineer José Rodriguez cut a 12-inch test record for the producer Tom Moulton. The format had only been used for LPs (albums) until then but Moulton immediately saw the potential of pressing extended, high resolution, DJ-friendly tracks to 12-inch vinyl. The first commercially available 12-inch single—Ten Percent by Double Exposure, featuring an extended version by the key disco producer Walter Gibbons—followed in 1976, with the “club mix” soon becoming a staple for disco labels. DJs had their format.
As we said earlier, there was pretty much no equipment on the market built specifically for DJs at the start of the ‘70s. DJs relied on mono mixers designed for radio broadcasting, while turntables came from the hi-fi market. The nature of the game was making do. But by the end of the ‘70s the situation had improved drastically.
The Technics SL-1200 was released in 1972, and although it was originally positioned as a high-end consumer product, DJs quickly sensed its potential. Like the SP-10 before it, the SL-1200 had a direct-drive motor, with the platter mounted directly onto the deck’s motor, rather than via a belt. This greatly improved torque meant that DJs could cue, back-spin, and nudge the platter in ways that were often impossible with older belt-driven models. The DJ could also adjust the pitch by +/- 8% via two small rotary controls, while the deck’s quartz lock reduced the playback drift that a lot of older turntables were prone to.
The SL-1200 may not have been designed with DJs in mind, but its successor, 1979’s SL-1200 MK2, certainly was. The MK2 featured the now iconic +/- 8% pitch slider, improved quartz lock, better torque, anti-skip feet, and a heavier chassis, which reduced vibration and feedback. In fact, the MK2s were so durable that many of the units from back then are still in use today. Its design, meanwhile, became the industry standard for DJ decks, a fact that remains to this day.
“The invention of the Technics was groundbreaking,” said Bill Brewster. “It completely changed the game. And if you look at how quickly the nightclub industry moved over to them, it was swift.”
A year before the release of the SL-1200, the market for DJ mixers got started. The Bozak CMA-10-2DL, released in 1971, was the first widely available DJ mixer. It featured four stereo inputs, a cueing system, EQ, and a wide, rack-mountable design. It was the first time that DJs had a mixer tailored specifically to their needs. The Bozak, which maintains a reputation for quality audio to this day, wound up in the booths of the most influential clubs of the era—The Gallery, Studio 54, The Paradise Garage.
“There was one store in New York called AST and it was a major store for lights and sound,” recalled Morales. “On the wall they had all the rotary mixers. I’d go there with no money, but I’d still go after work just to listen and look. Some of those mixers, like the Bozak and others, weren’t anywhere near my price range, but it didn’t matter. I liked just being there, seeing the gear.”
The CMA-10-2DL was designed by Louis Bozak in collaboration with the engineer Alex Rosner, a major behind-the-scenes figure who is known as the inventor of the DJ mixer and the sound designer of Mancuso’s Loft. Rosner had designed a basic mixer with a cueing system for Francis Grasso called Rosie, which fed into the design of the CMA-10-2DL.
Cheaper mixers with crossfaders arrived at the back end of the ‘70s. In the UK there was the Citronic SMP101 (about which very little information can still be found) while the US equivalent was the GLI PMX 7000. Released in 1977, a product advert for the PMX 7000 talked up its affordable price point of $299. (For context this is today the equivalent of around $1,600.) With vertical faders and a crossfader positioned below, the PMX 7000 would prove to be highly influential for the design of later DJ mixers.
“We didn’t have crossfaders that went from left to right,” said Theodore. “Our crossfaders were up and down. And at one time we didn’t even have earphones.
“And then all of a sudden these companies started making mixers that actually had the earphone jack. So the equipment that we were buying was starting to change. The turntables were starting to change. They used to be belt drive, but then they became direct drive. Our mixers were really small, but then our mixes started to get bigger and bigger because they were putting on equalizers. So there were a lot of things that these electronic companies were doing to cater to the DJ.”
Although the format was only really used in leading New York venues, it’s worth mentioning the impact of reel-to-reel tape machines. The disco mixes that came to prominence in the ‘70s were often created in the studio by splicing tape and looping sections to make a track’s arrangement more DJ-friendly. These often exclusive versions were then passed to DJs and played back using the club’s tape machine.
“In New York they were technically advanced,” said Brewster. “Remixing and editing started there, and they were using reel-to-reel machines they brought in from the studio—quarter-inch tape. Later on, they used cassette tapes too. You could get cassette decks with variable speed, so you could actually mix using quarter-inch tape or cassettes as well.”
The ‘70s was also a foundational decade for the development of DJ-orientated soundsystems. Design for the Bozak mixer was also shaped by Richard Long, the now legendary sound engineer who designed systems for the Paradise Garage, Better Days, and Studio 54. Long’s builds for these venues shaped the platonic ideal of the club sound that we still hold now. His systems were known for deep, physical bass, warm mids, clear, detailed highs, dispersed sound, and plenty of oomph.
It would be easy for us to look back on all of the fabled names associated with the 1970s—the stories, the innovations, the clubs—and conclude that this was the decade that DJs truly emerged as global cultural figures. But outside of a few communities in New York, this just wasn’t really the case.
“I honestly don’t think the view of what a DJ was, and what a DJ did, really changed until acid house in the late ‘80s,” said Bill Brewster in relation to the UK. “That’s what fundamentally changed everything. Before that, very few people aspired to be a DJ.
“When I started, I didn’t even particularly want to DJ. I only started because I was a record collector and I had a good collection. People started asking me because they knew I had records. It really wasn’t a job many people coveted. It had very little prestige. Most people thought of DJs as being slightly idiotic. That wasn’t true of all DJs, of course. There were a couple of DJs where I grew up who didn’t talk on the mic, they just played music.”
Even for Morales, who came of age during the disco boom in New York, the idea of the DJ as a person of interest hadn’t yet broken through. “There wasn’t a culture around it, so you didn’t know any DJs. No DJ was popular in that mainstream sense. Looking back at the history, you had names like Tom Savarese and other disco DJs. Larry Levan was playing at the Continental Baths in the late ’70s before moving into the ’80s, but there were only certain venues where the DJ was the focus.”
Levan and the venue he wound up at, the Paradise Garage, are two of the major forces that pushed the story of dance music DJing from its origins in the ‘70s to its explosion in the ‘80s. At the Paradise Garage, the highly influential Greenwich Village club that opened in 1977, Levan popularized the image of the DJ as a music maker and much more besides.
“[Larry Levan] is the modern template of what a DJ is now,” said Honey Dijon in the BBC film .
“Larry was way ahead of his time,” Morales told the BBC. “The first DJ remixer. The first DJ producer. The first DJ artist.”
“The Garage was the first club that really made it about the DJ,” Morales told me. “If you knew the history, you might know someone like [the Studio 54 and Hollywood DJ] Richie Kaczor, but generally the public didn’t know the DJ’s name.”
Danny Krivit was well aware of the DJs pushing things forward, but it’s worth remembering that his appreciation of the mid-to-late ‘70s wave comes from the perspective of someone within the profession. “The next group was more technical, more incredible mixing,” he said. “People like Walter Gibbons (Galaxy 21), Richie Kaczor (Hollywood), Tony Smith (Barefoot Boy), Michael Cappello (Enchanted Gardens), Tee Scott (Better Days), Bobby DJ (Le Jardin). My favorite, Larry Levan, was in a class by himself. Not every mix was great, but when they were on, they were inspired, and like David Macuso he controlled the vibe and the party like the Loft on steroids—in a good way.”
For Theodore in the Bronx, hip-hop culture and DJing had advanced rapidly by the end of the ‘70s—they just hadn’t yet broken into the mainstream. “There was a really big difference by the end of the ‘70s,” he said. “You started to get the hip-hip groups. The equipment started to get bigger. The music started to evolve. People started getting managers and stuff like that. People started making mix tapes and making records.
“We did a lot of mixtapes,” he continued. “So a lot of our mixtapes were going to family members from Baltimore or North Carolina or Florida or places like that. They’d come to the Bronx, and we would end up making a mixtape for them, and they would take it back to their city. That’s how some of the stuff was starting to spread, you know. A lot of the mixtapes played a major role, and our music started being spread. So the mixtapes were very, very important.”
The first hip-hop records were released in 1979—Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” by Fatback Band—and they were essentially recorded representations of the collaboration between DJs and MCs that had formed at hip-hop parties during the ‘70s. For a brief time in the years that followed, the DJ and the MC were on an equal footing in hip-hop. But it was a share of power that wasn’t set to last, as MCs conquered the globe in the following decades.
The worlds of dance music and hip-hop DJing have changed immeasurably since their formation in the 1970s. The scale of modern DJs’ audiences and the sophistication of their tools would seem completely alien to the culture’s originators. But not all changes are necessarily for the better. In closing, I asked Brewster and Morales if there was anything they felt had been lost from those early days, and interestingly they both landed in the same place.
“The commitment to dancing has been diluted by distractions like phones with cameras and video,” said Brewster. “It’s not the same everywhere, it’s by no means across the board. There are lots of clubs where people come and they dance. But there are far too many where, instead of enjoying and experiencing the moment, people are too busy documenting it. And in doing that they’re actually missing the moment. If you just enjoyed the moment and savoured it in your memory, I think that’s almost more powerful than trying to document every minute of every gig or night out.”
“The most important thing is the audience—the audience that engages with and appreciates the music, supporting it, celebrating, dancing, socialising with others to create this sense of energy,” said Morales. “People dancing with each other, smiling, singing songs to each other. Relationships are built, people fall in love, songs take people back to a moment in time so that when they hear that song again, they remember that moment in their life. Back then you didn’t have people standing still like you do today. Now you have people just standing still, filming.”
Everyone I spoke to for this piece are now in their 60s or 70s, and of course hold their early experiences of DJing and dance floors among their favorites. But Brewster was also keen to stress that the culture’s best days aren’t necessarily behind it. “I don’t want to get into all of those ‘old-person complaints’ about everything that’s new, because actually some of the best parties I’ve done have been in the last four or five years.
“I did a party in Sri Lanka about two months ago, and it was genuinely a top-five party experience. And that was in a tiny little club that held 300 people and it was honestly amazing. So I know that those things still happen and I don’t want to be an old man complaining about young people because, you know, I love playing now. I get so much pleasure from it.”
