Last April, a 28-year-old called Tim Bergling – known to millions as the Swedish superstar DJ and producer Avicii – took his own life while on holiday in Oman. He had retired from nearly a decade of heavy touring in 2016, having had his appendix and gall bladder removed in 2014 due to alcoholism; Bergling also suffered from pancreatitis. A documentary about his career – True Stories (2017) – reportedly contained scenes in which the exhausted DJ pleaded with management to cancel bookings, meeting with resistance. It’s since been removed from Netflix.
Bergling did not write this anonymous exposé of the cult of the DJ, and neither did Erick Morillo, the veteran US house DJ whose ketamine addiction nearly lost him his arm, or Deadmau5, the rodent-headed DJ who has struggled with depression. But you suspect they would have recognised much of what goes on between its covers. This is not DJs Complaining, the amusing Twitter account that used to retweet entitled beat-mongers griping about having to put on pants to accept room service. This is a gooseflesh-inducing account of the dysfunctional world of fun, where everyone is having it very large indeed, until it all goes Pete Tong.
Over 300 pages and a glossary (“Gak: cocaine”), an anonymous British DJ more than 20 years Bergling’s senior careers around the world, spinning vinyl, having the highest jinks, and taking shedloads of base amphetamine, apparently the drug of choice of nurses, taxi drivers and 72-hour party people, in order to do what, it transpires, can be quite a lonely and dissociative job. “Make people dance. Shut up. Go home. Sleep. Repeat. Minus the sleep part.”
Secret is the kind of guy who minds his DJ booth changeover etiquette and cares quite deeply about his craft, but writes, at least in the first instance, like a 90s lad-rag fossil (“I feared very much that there may have been some blood in my alcohol system”), the better to court his target market. This is very much a book of two halves: the catnip highs to get party people hooked, and the lessons learned from some quite spectacular comedowns.
These lows actually compensate for the excess. First-person hedonism memoirs are rarely as entertaining as they think they are, and this one begins eye-rollingly, with our would-be Hunter S Thompson boarding a plane to Ibiza in the company of his sidekick, known as Tour Manager for his inability to function (again: base amphetamine). There was some talk in publishing in the 00s about magazines you could “inhale” and this is one of those instant-acting, moreish reads.
Naturally, Secret is complaining: about drunk Ibiza-bound civilians, about other DJs, about “his Tour Managerness”. Stick with him, though, through the after-parties, the veritable pharmacopoeia ingested in the name of fun and the pseudonymous fellow travellers, all called “Baccarat” or “Quag Allurgie”. Even though he addresses the reader directly as “Pilgrim”, Secret grows on you.
As behoves a man of 50, he has a few rants stored up. Secret’s scabrous analyses of club economics, of political hypocrisy, the lie of the dance counterculture (“just another revenue stream”) and the wider human condition stick in the mind as much as the descriptions of wasted people performing “doughnuts” in cars on clifftops in the dark. He makes reference to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and has the decency to feel squeamish about sexism.
It would be unsporting to try too hard to unmask Secret DJ. He came of age just before acid house and “made some pop records in the 90s”; he’s also “played jump-up dancehall to tribesmen in Tibet”. He suggests that he does not live in this country because of a misunderstanding about a tax bill. There’s nothing but contempt here for EDM, and how the 00s take-up of dance music bleached and straightened house (like disco, originally a black, gay and Latino underworld) for an unsophisticated mass audience. Secret’s words on managers bear echoing, in the light of Bergling’s demise. “They’re the ones who need you to work harder to make them more money.” Avicii, of course, named himself after the Buddhist concept of eternal hell.
Curiously for a book about music, there’s little in the way of actual tunes mentioned, the love of which might give Secret away. Unexpectedly, a bromance is the subplot of this cautionary tale: Tour Manager, whose charms are never quite explained, ends up a Colonel Kurtz-style hermit and nearly loses his family’s fortune in a dodgy Ibiza business deal.
It would be wrong, too, to lay bare the circumstances of Secret’s sudden retirement, but they are immensely sobering. “How low did I go?” he asks. “You know you’ve bottomed out when you’re using your diabetic dog’s needles to inject meth into your arse cheeks.” And that, Pilgrim, is not even the worst of it.
• The Secret DJ is published by Faber and Faber (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
