Indeep – Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life

A New York club single that stopped at 101

In 1982, Indeep released Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life on Sound of New York and Becket, catalogue SNY-5102. Michael Cleveland wrote it. He and Reggie Thompson produced it. Réjane “Reggie” Magloire and Rose Marie Ramsey sing it. Cleveland, who put the New York group together, takes the spoken section himself. Andy Wallace engineered. On the 12-inch, Tony Humphries mixed the Sure Shot version, and Gene Griffin was executive producer. The long version, the one on the 1983 album Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life!, runs 5 minutes and 40 seconds. The 7-inch edit runs 4 minutes and 16. The B-side is D.J. Delight. Later compilations, including The Collection, only repackage the same 1982 recording.

The lyric is a small story. A woman is home, bored, calling a man who does not answer. She thinks about leaving. A DJ plays a record and the night turns. Cleveland’s rap says there is not a problem he cannot fix, because he can do it in the mix. The 12-inch even isolates the sound effects used in the words: a phone ringing, tyres, a toilet flush. The point, at the time, was to give club DJs pieces they could drop into their own sets. Magloire and Ramsey carry the sung hook. Cleveland later told Billboard that he wrote the songs, but that his sense of them came from what women told him.

US pop radio barely touched it. Billboard’s Hot 100 listed the single at number 101, a place just outside the chart, not inside it. Club play was another story: number 2 on the dance-club chart, number 10 on the R&B chart. In February 1983 it reached number 13 in the UK, and the BPI later marked it silver. The Netherlands took it to number 2. France, Belgium and West Germany all put it in the top 10, and Greece and Zimbabwe listed it at number 1.