Welcome To The Club – The Life and Lessons of a Black Female DJ

This rollicking memoir takes you through unmarked doors vibrating with bass to celebrate a life lived to the full in dance music. For Paulette The Club is many things. It’s her escape from a too-young marriage. It’s Manchester’s Number One where she’s an extrovert dancer freaking out to Prince. It’s the Haçienda, where she’s resident DJ in a cast iron bikini at the stereotype-busting Flesh. It’s youth TV where she’s a shaven-headed face to reckon with. Later it’s the music biz club where she’s doing label press and A&R with Gilles P and Talking Loud, Black Market, Azuli, Defected. The Club is The Zap, Queer Nation, Venus, Vague, as she clocks up motorway miles guesting at the best queer nights in the land. And when she becomes Ministry of Sound’s special envoy, a globetrotting DJ with just one name, for Paulette The Club is the whole wide world.

But the title is also about The Club that keeps a tough guard on its velvet rope. This is a book about insiders and outsiders in an industry as riddled with inequalities as any other, but that until recently believed its own hype. For most of its history dance music thought of itself – if it thought much at all – as a diverse and inclusive rainbow nation. ‘Hand in hand… we’ll make it to the promised land.’ Paulette’s book questions this, loving the moments when she finds that it’s true, and calling it out with footnotes and statistics when it most patently isn’t. Who gets into the club, how long they stay there, how much they get paid and how well they are remembered – it’s not always fair and it’s often not even clear. Sex, race and gender are the filters she applies, and while her arguments hit home she avoids drowning you in academic abstractions.

With nine lives lived in Manchester, Ibiza, Paris and London, Paulette has plenty of tales to tell. She regales taking ‘lines of cocaine off the highly mirrored wedge heel of a now collectible Prada shoe that was passed under a toilet door.’ Or playing overtime because the DJ following her at the Terrace in Space is too spannered to see. Or grabbing her identical twin Paula to stand in for her because her head’s in bits from an ill-timed pill – then enduring the DJ frustration at hearing the crowd ebb away as her sister plays the same record three times in a row.

And she’s great on the grinding prep work of a committed DJ. The endless processing of music and the hours of listening to duff tunes in search of gold. She details the bad diet, grim rooms, cancelled flights and poorly arranged itineraries of the pro, with great images like ‘a travel iron with half the carpet melted onto it.’ The recent paralysis of lockdown is especially vivid. It was so destructive to freelancers in general, but especially to DJs, who saw their livelihoods cease overnight. Beset by covid-sponsored anxiety, Paulette suffers her own literal paralysis, then pulls out of it with strength of will and the support of a new community online.

Most of all, this is a survival manual – mentorship on the page. Paulette is a role model laid bare, offering an honest recounting of her career, full of wisdom, guidance and occasional rage, with tips and watch-outs for DJs of any sex or gender. She gives encouragement to be proudly difficult: in a great note of defiance she declares that she no longer tries to fit in, ‘with people or in places where I no longer fit.’

Her formative experiences chime with other foundational female voices in DJing’s history, most of whom say they weren’t aware of barriers to entry because they made their own way in a role that hadn’t yet gathered many rules. ‘In the beginning, “DJ” wasn’t a career ambition or goal for anyone (men included) so we women never saw our gender, race or sexuality as compromising it any further.’

Instead, she says she was largely self-propelled: ‘We did it for love. We did it for the party,’ she says. ‘We founded a new culture, a new way of life, then shared our love, vision, desire and the obsession that drives us generously with the world. With no one like us who we could model ourselves on, we became the influencers and influences of the future.’

In the back end of the book she rejoices in the latest incarnation of this club she’s helped build. Which like all the best spots is filling up with new faces, voices and energy. Paulette celebrates her new sisters with big-ups and shout-outs, paying it forward to the inheritors of the decks. ‘I love it. We all love it. I totally buzz off what I do. I am grateful every day that I can do what I do as a full-time job. There is nothing that matches that feeling of connection between myself and a crowd that’s as passionate, obsessive and excited about music as I am.’

Full disclosure here: Bill and I figure in the book somewhat – as ‘gatekeepers’ of the history, though, as we told her, we could never think of ourselves that way. If anything, we felt like chancers who’d struck lucky, surprised no-one more qualified had beaten us to it. We felt honoured to tell the story, detectives pressing record and putting the protagonists’ voices directly on the page. But of course, gatekeepers we were. Paulette’s book reminds us that with all the best intentions we made conscious and unconscious choices about who got our airtime.

We owe her a big hug of thanks for this; she was one of the people we turned to in 2021 to understand our own book better. In 23 years its place in the world had evolved. And if the meaning of a text changes with its reader, Paulette was one of the readers for whom it was now different. She helped us go deeper into the struggles women DJs have faced, detailing the wage inequality and barriers to recognition they still encounter. She was a big part of us refitting Last Night a DJ Saved My Life with the self-knowledge it needed to sit comfortably on the shelves again.

Her own volume enlarges on those same themes brilliantly. In graceful readable style it’s an account of the sexism, racism and ageism in thirty years of dance music, as well as the career moves, milestones and missteps of a black woman DJ not afraid to make her point. As history gets more granular it gets more true. And an eyewitness report from the global DJ booth like this is peak personal truth. It sits well with recent memoirs from Harold Heath and Emma Warren – soul-baring accounts of this living culture we’ve all been part of. Thankfully, with dance music narratives less of a rarity, the players no longer need gatekeepers to tell their stories.

Even fuller disclosure: let me also fess up that I may have helped set this book back as much as a decade by giving Paulette writerly ‘advice’ back when I was younger and way more stupid. Thankfully, my unhelpful help – about upping the drama and layering on the sensational – is now redundant. The intervening years have let her write a much better book than I think either of us imagined back then.

For one, she’s come to it stronger and more focused, fierce grey beehive to the fore. The last decade has been one of growth, setback and rebirth for her, as she’ll tell you elegantly on the page. And the terrible clarifying events of George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo awakening have created a context into which it falls perfectly. This book is angrier, clearer, more timely. It has more of a mission, and it’s also more loving, more grateful, more evocative and personal. 2023 is different too. The narrative is richer, the machinery of culture more widely understood, the battles for visibility and recognition no longer so far behind the scenes.

‘My hope is that this book embarrasses the DJ boys’ club into throwing its doors wide open to admit, acknowledge, appreciate embrace… the significant contribution made by women, people of colour and other marginalised communities who created this scene and continue to make it so varied and rich… We have more than earned our membership but we won’t beg for the space at the table.’

Though she’s a softie at heart, our Paulette doesn’t let anyone off the hook. In Welcome to the Club she cuts to the quick with her incisive Manc sarcasm, then, as you’re licking your wounds, there’s inclusive Manc love, wrapping you up in a cotton shawl with a mug of cocoa. With this heartfelt book, she’s joined another Club – that of the published author. And along the way she’s helped some of its earlier members better understand the privileges that offers. Thanks for both Miss P.

Frank Broughton