This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.
The standard histories. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, the fullest history of the DJ as a figure, and the indispensable source for Movement One’s New York chapters. Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds, the standard account of what happened after this book ends, and the best single source on how Chicago and Detroit records were received in Britain. Techno Rebels, Dan Sicko, the Detroit book, and the source most careful about the distinction between the two cities.
On Chicago specifically. The Underground Is Massive, Michaelangelo Matos, for the American story across the whole period. Love Saves the Day, Tim Lawrence, for the New York club culture this music inherits, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor for what followed. Jesse Saunders’s own account of the earliest records is an interested source and should be read as one; competing claims about who pressed first exist and this book reports the standard account rather than adjudicating. The radio chapter rests on the participants’ retrospective interviews and Chicago’s local press; the audience figures are the station’s and the DJs’ own claims, and the text labels them as claims.
On the equipment. Manufacturer documentation and the extensive technical literature on the three machines in Movement Two, which is unusually good because the instruments have been reverse-engineered and re-created many times. Analog Days, Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, for how electronic instruments reach musicians in the first place.
On the epidemic. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts, for the chronology and the institutional failure. This book states only the collective and documented facts and makes no claim about any individual’s health, for the reason given in that chapter.
On Britain. Altered State, Matthew Collin, for acid house, the drug and the panic; The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, Peter Hook, for what the Manchester club cost and who paid for it. Energy Flash, above, throughout.
On the business. The disputes over the Chicago catalogue have been reported extensively in the music press across four decades and have generated litigation continuing into the present. This book reports the artists’ consistent public accounts as their accounts, which is what they are. Creative License, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, for what sample clearance costs and why so much early house is now technically unclearable.
Contemporaneous press. The British weekly music papers from 1987, the British dance press from 1988, and Billboard's dance coverage throughout. Chicago’s local coverage of its own scene in the mid-eighties is thin, which is itself a finding.
Where figures are disputed (who pressed the first house record, where the word came from, what anybody was actually paid, the attendance at a baseball stadium in 1979) the text says so rather than choosing.
