Superstar DJs Here We Go!

Bankers aren't the only fabulously remunerated fat cats to have taken a tumble in the public's estimation recently. As Dom Phillips points out in his highly entertaining account of the rise and fall of British club culture, "superstar" DJs no longer command the devotion, or the fees, they used to.

Back in the Nineties they were adored, their antics big news. When Radio 1 nearly lost two of its top jocks, Zoe Ball and Lisa l'Anson on Ibiza in 1997, after they got trashed before going on air following all-night club benders, the nation was agog. Characters such as James Lavelle - DJ producer and boss of the ultra-fashionable dance label Mo Wax who in one year ran up personal debts of £270,000, nearly half of which went on drugs - were worshipped like rock stars. Many behaved like them. One lost his wife after she discovered a clause in his gig contracts specifying the provision of a blow job.

While the superjocks themselves are still in demand abroad - South America being a prime market nowadays - the British dance crowd has moved on. Sasha, Sparrow, Judge Jules and the rest, are yesterday's men. The scene's biggest name, Norman "Fatboy Slim" Cook, sold over a million copies here of his 1996 album, You've Come A Long Way, Baby. In 2004, Cook's last release, Palookaville, managed less than a tenth of that.

In a chapter headed "Millennium Meltdown", Phillips identifies the tipping point when the bubble burst in UK superclubland. New Year's Eve 1999 was supposed to be the superstar DJs' finest - or at least their most popular - moment. All over the country, dozens of huge events were planned. Cream promotions in Liverpool hosted five, the most expensive of which charged £99 for a ticket. For the top DJs, jetting around the country cramming in as many as four engagements in one 12-hour shift, this was their richest payday yet. Pete Tong made £125,000 that night; Norman Cook pocketed £140,000.

Sadly though the venues they played were seldom more than half full. The supergigs of Millennium Eve were massively undersubscribed. At Renaissance, the club which had kickstarted the scene in Mansfield in 1992, the promoter sold less than a fifth of the tickets he needed to break even and lost £200,000. Cream lost twice as much.

Those customers who did stump up for what turned out, in most cases, to be a decidedly draughty all-nighter, were unimpressed. At Gatecrasher in Leeds, a loud chorus of "w**ker!" interrupted Judge Jules' set. It was, Phillips argues, a classic case of the emperor's new clothes. In a memorable phrase, he describes how the realisation finally dawned that superstar DJs were "playing a real game with an imaginary ball".

This was not the way it was in the early days. Few of the pioneers of the superclub boom seem to have been strongly motivated by money, and when it started to roll in, were unsure what to do with it. Sparrow took to burying bundles of banknotes in his mother's back garden and stashed £315,000 in her attic. Nicky Holloway, a prototype of the superstar DJ who ended up broke and in re-hab, would earn his £500 a gig - the standard fee in the early '90s - and then swiftly blow it on drink and drugs.

The clubs that turned into giant cash generators started out as an inspired merger of two dance sub-cultures. The impromptu, unlicensed "acid house" raves of the late 1980s - which were coming under increasing pressure from the authorities and were eventually banned in 1994 - were re-styled along the lines of the glamorous, themed discos that flourished in New York. Ministry Of Sound was closely modelled on Manhattan's Paradise Garage. Musically, the scene was fuelled by the advent of sampling, easy-to use fast digital editing which allowed electronic artists a creative freedom they had never known before. What really kept the party going, though, were the drugs, and specifically ecstasy, an amphetamine derivative which made repetitive beats sound magical and crowds of strangers feel like lifelong friends.

Privately tolerating and managing dealers while publicly maintaining an anti-drugs policy soon became the crucial balancing act which all successful club men had to master if they were to survive. Cream, once described by its co-owner Derren Hughes as "a drug dealer's paradise", was threatened with closure by a court case in 1996 in which 18 members of its security staff were charged with drugs offences. What helped to get the case dismissed was Cream's claim that it had become a key cultural asset for Liverpool, bringing much needed cash and prestige to the rundown city centre. Applications to Liverpool University, defence witnesses alleged, had soared because of Cream - an assertion which was later repeated by the vice-chancellor in an interview with The Times.

Cream's triumphant reprieve marked the beginning of the end for the superclubs. Mainstream acceptance and loadsamoney had their usual, coarsening effect. As cocaine gradually replaced ecstasy as the clubbers' drug of choice, the ethos became edgier, louder and less friendly. The DJs were too busy "larging it" to care. According to one "it was about wearing designer clothes, pulling out a wad of twenties when you were buying your champagne. It was about buying your coke in an eight ball (a quarter of an ounce)." Mimicking the superclubs' tendency to celebrate their own success, New Labour, ever ready to hitch a ride with a happening youth movement, chose a top club anthem "Things Are Gonna Get Better" as its election night victory theme in 1997. By a nice irony, one of the most successful superstar DJs, Paul Oakenfold, currently owns a house in London's Connaught Square next door to Tony Blair's.

As a journalist for Mixmag, the clubbers' in-house glossy, Dom Phillips had firsthand experience of most of the events and characters he describes here. Although his decision to tell the story thematically muddles the chronology at times, his book is so packed with bizarre incidents and larger-than-life personalities you scarcely care. Especially attractive to the general reader is Phillips' ambivalence towards his subject. He acknowledges that ecstasy can, in rare cases, kill and that without it, a lot of '90s dance music makes little sense. As a fan of the original, anarchic spirit of acid house, he looks askance at the commercial feeding frenzy it spawned.

Phillips' clear-eyed awareness that many of the scene's major players were, first and last, cynical businessmen does prompt a question as to why it took the clubbing public so long to find them out. James Palumbo, owner of Ministry of Sound and, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, now worth £210m, made no bones of his disdain for the music that made his fortune. "I don't find it interesting," he commented. "Now, Beethoven - there was an innovator."

Superstar DJs, Here We Go!: the Rise and Fall of the Superstar DJ, by Dom Phillips (2009, Ebury Press).  Buy it online