Welcome to the club.
When DJ Paulette first took to the decks at the Hacienda’s ground-breaking gay night, Flesh, in 1991, female DJs were still a rarity. She was the first woman to have a residency in the hallowed Manchester club.
Her then-husband was discouraging, magazines often spent more time discussing what she was wearing than what she was playing, the pay was terrible and the equipment worse. But Paulette persisted, because she’d found something she loved.
Since then, she has lived in London, Paris and Ibiza. She has played in clubs all over the globe. She’s been a record company PR, a TV and radio presenter. And now she’s an author.
Her debut book Welcome To The Club is part memoir, part manifesto. There are, as you’d expect, some rollicking club anecdotes. There is anger and joy. But most of all, there is resilience. A quality Paulette has often needed, in her long career.
We’ve known each other a long time..
You were one of the first people I spoke to when I came back from Ibiza in 2016, to live in Manchester again. Do you remember? I was saying, “I’ve got to start all over again. And I don’t really know how to do it.”
It’s been an interesting journey. It’s the first time that I feel I have people looking out for me, giving advice, and pointing me in the right direction. People have given me just so much time, help and attention. And a lot of love, which I’ve never really felt before.
It’s not been without its challenges, but I just feel really secure going forward. Really strong.
It’s rarely easy for anyone in creative fields. But it was stacked more against you, every single time.
The colour aspect is something people still don’t take on board, but it explains why things have been so difficult, why it took so long, or why other people were sometimes chosen over me.
On a systemic level, it is part of it. It really does make a difference, for us. I’ve watched three documentaries recently, on Sonia Boyce, Malorie Blackman, and Bernardine Evaristo. And they all said that it took them to get the recognition for their work. When their peers, others with perhaps less talent, took a third of the time. There’s a pattern. But none of us like to say it.
But it needs to be said.
You can get bitter, or you can get better. And part of the journey is figuring out where you are on that spectrum! I haven’t let that bitterness drag me down. Because it could, very easily. But that’s not the direction I’ve chosen to go in.
It’s there, and it’s systemic. So even if I had the biggest JCB I cannot move that thing alone! But I can talk about it publicly, acknowledge it.
Then you choose to get better at what you do. That’s the ultimate revenge. It’s a mission, it’s work. But I’m not afraid of hard work. I’ve been doing it for a long time. And I am not going to stop, just because I’m older now!
Looking back on my own career, I thought there would be a point when I’d get accepted into the club, when the written invitation would arrive.
Absolutely! We love you. You’re fantastic. Join the club.
It took me ages to realise that you have to ask, and be clear about what you want. But that reluctance to put yourself forward is about gender, race, class, confidence. If you’re a straight, white man who went to Eton, you’ll find it a lot easier.
But it’s hard to see that, at the time. You blame yourself.
Even in a successful career, most of us have fallow periods, stretches when you fall out of favour. And again, the only way out of that is to bang on door after door until one opens.
Nobody is immune to that in the creative industries. It’s how it works: cycles, trends. You have your moment, but when it fades, it’s up to you to figure out if you want to keep going.
It’s like poker: are you happy to stick there, or are you going to see somebody and raise them? You have to decide, ‘OK. I want to go again. And I’m going to bet on this. I’m going to make it work.’
If you keep going, the levels get higher. But a downturn will come. That’s just the nature of the beast. And you have to be comfortable about it and not think, ‘I’m the worst person in the entire world. I’m so shit at my job.’ It’s just the cycle. It’s someone else’s turn at the top, now. Or it’s your turn to do something different, to switch it up.
That’s when you need your network, your mates. It’s about finding your people, helping them when you can, and being willing to ask for help when you need it.
Like you, I’m working-class. We don’t speak up, and we don’t ask for anything. We take what we’re given, and we’re happy with that. We will struggle on, and do it ourselves: “It’s fine. I’m fine. No, thanks. It’s alright.” Until you realise you’re not fine. And if you’d have asked for help a few months earlier, your life could have been so much easier.
It’s just learning that it’s OK to ask. On top of that, I’m Jamaican. And we really don’t like to ask. My mum would rather die than ask somebody to help her out! Learning that I can ask for help has made a massive difference; understanding that asking for help is not a weakness, it’s a strength. And some people love to help. But they’re not mind-readers! Nobody knows what you need, until you say it.
With guys, it’s different. Because they’re brought up in a different way. I wrote about that on the book. Men will apply for jobs even if they don’t know how to do it. Whereas women will only apply if they 100% know they can do that job. That difference holds us back. We don’t feel like we can do it. It’s this perfectionism that stifles ambition and prevents us from taking our rightful place at the table.
But push yourself. Apply for something you can’t do; ask for something you can’t get. You might not get that job, but there might be something underneath it that could be right for you.
I don’t recall you ever saying to me, “I’m playing this club. Do you want to write about it?” Whereas most of the male DJs I knew in the 80s and 90s would ask that regularly.
I’m learning to push myself forward more now. For instance with the book: I’m taking charge, doing my own PR. I feel ready to do that now.
With books now, no matter what your publisher says, you still have manage your own publicity. And you have the experience, from doing music PR.
Yes, and I could always tell which artists were going to break big. Because they were enthusiastic, hungry. They were engaged, interested and constantly asking questions: Why are we doing this? What if we did that? The others expected everything to be delivered for them.
Applying that to myself, I realised that I needed to be a bit more engaged and involved, to get my network working again. I’m always a bit shy around people, and that can be misread. So I’ve done a lot of work on myself. You can’t just sit back and expect it to fall in your lap. Because it won’t.
There are some great club anecdotes in the book, but for me the standout was the chapter on the pandemic. You were searingly honest about your mental health.
Two months before the pandemic, I’d been discharged from therapy and I was still a bit raw. I remember saying to my friend, “I’ll be able to deal with this, if it’s just for six weeks or so. But if it’s longer, I’m going to struggle.’
And my friend said, ‘It’ll only be a couple of weeks.’ Nobody knew how it would unfold.
When I had my first anxiety attack, we hadn’t even been in lockdown for that long. But for 30 years, pretty much, I’d been travelling the world. Every weekend, it was another city, another club. And I was in full-time work for a lot of those years, too. So I’ve been really, really busy. Even when I wasn’t getting the big bookings, I was still doing eight-hour DJ sets in Ibiza and making radio shows.
So what happened?
Lockdown was fine, for the first week. I did the gardening, the weather was great. It was lovely. Then I sat on the sofa, literally not moving, looking at my phone. Something just happened to my head. I was properly losing my mind, losing a grip on whatever reality is.
I live on my own. And I couldn’t see anyone. When that bubble of three came in June, it was the greatest relief!
I thought it was important to show that, because most people think DJing is really glamorous. And for sure, that’s how it looks on Instagram. But I wanted to tell the story behind that, because we all keep our personal lives, our struggles off social media. It looks like this fantasy world where everything’s perfect and great and everyone’s smiley, happy. But there’s a lot of work behind it.
One of my early readers was also a DJ. He loved that chapter but he also found it very triggering. Iit just brought it all flooding back: being so desperate, having no money and no work. The government didn’t care: they were asking us to retrain. Retrain how? This is the job we’ve been training to do for years. It’s not just a fun hobby.
And we can’t all work in cyber security!
Exactly. The government needs to understand that it’s as much a job as somebody working at a bank. Our hours are different, but it’s still hard work. And we don’t need Rishi Sunak telling us to retrain!
So what’s your plan now?
I want my own radio show. And if it was at the BBC, that would be a wonder. Last year, I did shows on Radio 6 deputising for Craig Charles, Afrodeutsche, and Amy Lamé. So I’m on the radar now, at least.
I also want to write fiction, and I’ve got some great ideas. My brain is just absolutely fizzing. But as you and I both know, writing a book takes ages!
I submitted the proposal for this book in April 2021, I spent most of 2022 writing it, and it was October 23 before it was completely done. So next time, it needs to pay a bit more. Maybe I find a literary agent first! I know writing doesn’t pay, necessarily..
Stephen King and JK Rowling might disagree! There’s still money to be made from writing.
Right. So instead of saying that it doesn’t pay, I need to say: it will pay. To think about it in a more abundant way, and work out what steps I need to take to make it pay. Then I will happily and enthusiastically write a fantastic bestseller – which I think one of these ideas is.
And the DJing continues, of course. I’ve got some big dates coming up for 2024 that people don’t know about yet. It’ll be nice to reveal those.
So just more of the same. No! More, and better.
Nice rephrase there!
Part of my process now is listening to myself, hearing what I’m saying, So I’m thinking about it in the right way.
We tell terrible stories about ourselves: that will never work, that won’t pay, I’m not good enough, this person doesn’t like me. Tell yourself better stories, and everything changes.
That’s one of the things that came out of therapy: realising that some of the prisons I have felt I am in have been self-created. Because I will tell myself, ‘Oh, I can’t do that. I’m not producer.’ Or, ‘This person doesn’t like me.’
But how do you know? Unless you can read their mind, you could be wrong. There’s a way of investigating these things that can be a lot more productive, and gets better results.
It’s seven years since I’ve moved back to Manchester, and everything has changed. In Ibiza, I just wasn’t around the right people. Now I’ve found a network of people Who I can trust, and who trust me implicitly. We work together, we listen to me, we give advice and offer to help. It’s a two-way street.
It’s not just about helping me get a job. In the pandemic, we picked up the phone to check up on each other. And they were there to hold me up when three people in my family died, when I’d got no work.
I’ve made seriously good friends, and they are also on that ascent. We’re all in motion, going somewhere, helping each other. We’re the pom pom cheerleaders when it’s going well, and we’re there for each other when it all goes tits up.
No creative can make it on their own. We all need our tribe.
Absolutely. It was my friend Tracey who said to me in Ibiza, “You’re in the wrong place. This place isn’t good for you.” It was the worst advice anyone could give me at the time. I’d moved my whole life over there, and she was telling me that I should leave. But I have never been more grateful for somebody giving me a piece of bad news.
It’s what good friends do, isn’t it?
And Tracy and I are still super good friends. We can be honest with each other. We all need someone like that.
What do you think?