With dim red lights filtering across you as the clock strikes 3 am – maybe with the sudden need to squeeze your way through the sweaty, skimpily dressed bodies – your mind may not drift to the towering figure on stage, behind the wall of speakers, disk jockeys, or as DJ Paulette reminisced, crates of vinyl heavy enough to make you loathe a multi-floor apartment. Her first novel Welcome to the Club: The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ, however, discusses the mirage of DJing, breaking down the glamorisation and idolisation of the job through the exclusions she was coerced to navigate.
Slumped in a mismatched armchair whilst people-watching the Northern Quarter through the window of Chapter One, I recognised DJ Paulette strolling into the café, matching bright yellow hat and scarf defending her from the after-effects of Storm Eowyn. She sunk into the armchair opposite, Earl Grey in hand, immediately grabbing the attention of the owner’s dogs, whom she knew by name and who also refused to leave us without her affection, which she happily offered. After a 30-minute conversation about the progression of our shared English Literature BAs and the previous day’s election results, we swiftly moved on to discussing Welcome to the Club.
I began by asking if Welcome to the Club was Paulette’s first experience with non-academic writing (aside from university work). A childhood gift, a typewriter, started it all, birthing her own weekly newspaper fit with an agony aunt problems page (which she would “write in” to herself, of course). Aside from writing and editing for various magazines, it was Paulette’s diaries, which she had begun writing at seven years old, that were her true writing inspiration.
“When they approached me to write [the novel], I was like yeah, I’ve got loads of material,” she reflected, thinking of the decades of diaries that encompassed her personal and professional journey. However, this was seemingly not enough, with editors through the writing process advising against Welcome to the Club’s narrative: “They said it’s not sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll enough”. This struck a nerve.
“When people were telling me that my story wasn’t relevant”, she was coerced to question “why is your story relevant and mine isn’t?” Beginning the writing process in 2021, “this is when the world had changed” for Black writers such as herself. No longer was their writing being immediately dismissed. Following the reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement in the early pandemic, “people were now looking for that story” she reflected, “it became possible to talk about the Black experience and to see that as relevant”.
Paulette reminisced on the early period of her career in a similar way, writing in her first chapter, Finders Keepers: “I fought for recognition” and a space “in the boy’s club”. It’s obvious from the novel that this fight was not something that ceased quickly for her.
The recognition of non-white creatives and consumption of their work increased in the following years, while feeling like relatively distant history now, which created a collective mindset shift towards Black creatives. Alongside creating more opportunities, it also created more frustrations. I enquired into the responsibility that intrinsically comes with such an intersectional identity as DJ Paulette, and the frustrations of only being spoken of as a queer, Black, female DJ – never just a DJ. She simply explained, “I have to be a representative and I have to lean into that. I’m okay with that”.
Whilst this representational responsibility within the creative sphere is something that Paulette acknowledges, she continued, “Sometimes it’s frustrating, you know, I can’t speak for everyone, not every Black, female DJ is from Manchester or working-class but also studied at university and wrote her own book”. For her, Welcome to the Club is creating visibility of one life, a life that could be relatable, enlightening or inspiring. “When I started there was no one – so I wanted to be that”.
Titling the novel The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ she encompasses its purpose. Paulette is a singular Black woman DJ using her 30-year career to project this experience in an attempt to enlighten people who are similar and opposing to her.
The book is a written role model, the protagonist a unique identity navigating the creative world: “I didn’t want to just put myself out there but the fact that I exist – not even that I exist but that it exists and it is possible”. ‘It’. Queer. Black. Working-class. Northern. Woman. Success.
“I didn’t want it to be a me-biography”, she mused, “I wanted to focus on the music, focussing on the personal story but only from the point of where I had discovered this self – this self that I still am”. The novel begins in 1992, when DJ Paulette was still just Paulette, halfway through her degree, halfway through her divorce, and her first DJ gig had just fallen into her hands.
Beginning chronologically, we are taken through the beginnings of her DJ career. “What happened from 2002 to 2008, when I was in Paris, was I started to experience the real-life politics of it”. During this chapter (London to Paris: Eurostar), the novel “stops being a story of me and becomes a story of the career, of being a female creative”.
Why did you not want to write a me-biography as you phrased earlier? She replied, “I’m not dead. I’m still working, I’m still DJing and I didn’t want to feel like I’m shutting off because I’m still going”. While the highs and lows of her career undoubtedly shaped the DJ Paulette that we listen to today, “I wanted the book to really make a space the foundation of the job [instead of] people seeing it as a hobby you can just retire”. The novel has a much higher purpose than outlining one person’s DJing career, “I want politicians to read it and to get to understand what the culture is”.
Why is DJ culture so dismissed? Is it the drugs? Is it the young demographic? Is it the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle DJ Paulette outlined? “People think that is the way they have to be to do this job”. However, reigning sober since 2018, she reflected on the drug culture of young DJs in Chapter Three (Bad Behaviours: Shit shags and crap hotels) and her own not-too-professional experiences. Concluding the novel with her dedication to sobriety, she completes her journey of personal and professional growth away from these expectations.
It’s an inspiration she didn’t have during her early career. Of course, many DJs, especially those at the beginning of their career (as DJ Paulette was), live in excess “and they suffer from that excess” she stated. Her transparency throughout the novel was all the more enlightening: “it’s important to tell the story that you don’t have to be that – it will make it more difficult – but you don’t have to” – words no one had spoken to her.
With the progression of her career, I enquired how her perception of fame had shifted, especially with the immortalisation of her career in this novel. “At the beginning, it was different anyway, there was no social media and how people became famous was by playing the parties that people were talking about”. But life without social media wasn’t necessarily easier to navigate, “these parties weren’t open to everyone”, with many finding themselves stagnant in small venues, with small crowds and small income.
“Unlike social media now – being famous was really about talent”. We’ve all seen a multi-million-view TikTok artist starting a tour after one viral video catapulted them into playlists and fame, and whilst it might seem tinged with jealousy, the attainability of virality and fame has exponentially grown thanks to social media. If you ignored the influx of social media presence, you got “left behind”, DJ Paulette reflects. “That was one of the splits for many artists”.
In this conversation, she casually mused, “I’m not even famous”. I returned to this, asking if her perception of her own fame was present in her mind when writing a novel that profited from the story of her career: “Absolutely yes, but I had to let go of it”. “It’s more of an everyman’s story”, and letting go of her perceptions of her fame “is really foundational of the book”.
The rising-from-the-bottom sentiments encompass the narrative of the novel, being that “every person can do this if I could”. Her candid honesty in struggling to uphold these sentiments when reflecting on her career was refreshing. I was reminded of a similar exclamation in the novel’s final chapter, “it probably hasn’t raised my position in the DJ ranking either, but that was never my aim”.
As an acoustic band began to swell and fill the café with ‘Shape of You’, I concluded our conversation with asking what Paulette happened to be reading at the moment: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.
“It will scare the shit out of you, in light of what is happening with Trump and where that could possibly go. I recommend everyone reads this book because it will scare you and if people are scared maybe they will open their eyes to what is happening.” “It’s set in 2024 and where it hits [reading it] in 2024 will make you go”, as she opened her eyes as wide as they will go, flashing her hands in the air.
Throwing the yellow scarf over her shoulder and running out of the café to save her car from the parking meter, I was left in the wake of our conversation. Welcome to The Club: The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ is exactly that, welcoming everyone to the conversation of racial, sexist and homophobic tribulations, the struggle of making it big in the DJ scene, and the everchanging cultural landscape.
I will finish with a quote from the final chapter, Lifetime VIP: a manifesto: “We have more than earned our membership but we won’t beg for a space at the table. Men aren’t the only humans who can handle a flat pack from Ikea. We can assemble our own”.
