We need to think about how we document dance music culture. It may seem odd saying this when there are so many magazines, podcasts, and websites dedicated to it, but this is only a recent phenomenon. For much of the 50 or so years dance music has existed, there was little or no accurate documentation of DJs, clubs, dancers, or the music that made them all move.

“One of the reasons Frank [Broughton] and myself wrote Last Night A DJ Saved My Life was because we felt the culture had been so badly documented,” Bill Brewster says, of their definitive 1999 book. “I read so many times that the Paradise Garage was based in New Jersey rather than New York City. In the British press, it moved around more than a mobile disco.”

Brewster was one of the UK’s first dance music journalists, building on the work of youth culture writers Sheryl Garratt, Editor of The Face from 1989-95, and i-D’s Matthew Collin and John Godfrey. Aside from those running black music magazines like Blues & Soul, and acid house era fanzines like Boy’s Own, Boomtown, and Freaky Dancing, they were lone operatives working with publications that gave limited space for club reporting.

“Our aim was that if you were coming from Mars and wanted to know what young people were interested, then we’d give you a snapshot of it in The Face,” Garratt says. “There was never any sense of, ‘This month we must find a club to cover’. If we didn’t have a club story, we did fashion. If we didn’t do fashion, then we did something else.”

While some more established youth culture journalists periodically took an interest (Jon Savage included some of his musings on acid house in his 1996 anthology, Time Travel), Garratt was one of the few club culture specialists in the UK at the time, along with Sherman, Jack Barron, and Helen Mead at the NME, among others. “Because I was seen as being in the middle of it, there would be an annual call from a national newspaper asking me to write a piece about dance music,” she says. “It was like I was supposed to feel honoured.”

When clubbing turned from a niche pursuit into a national hobby in the early ’90s, Garratt and her colleagues were at the forefront of chronicling it. Some of them later wrote vital early histories, mixing their lived experience and collected knowledge with quotes from vast numbers of interviews.

1998 saw the publication of three foundational tomes. Garratt’s Adventures in Wonderland paid particular attention to Chicago house (a scene she’d experienced first-hand in 1986) and the rise of acid house in the UK. Matthew Collin’s Altered State chronicled MDMA’s impact and the British DJs and clubs that popularised it, and Simon Reynolds’s Energy Flash focused on the music, introducing the concept of the “hardcore continuum” to explain the bass-heavy pulse of British clubs.

Their significance (and of 1999’s Last Night A DJ Saved My Life) lies not in their obvious quality, or the fact that they were amongst the first to attempt to make sense of dance music in the UK, but in the way that they set in stone interpretations of events that persist to this day.