People assume the title is a Faithless reference. It is a fair guess and it is the wrong one — God Is a DJ came out in 1998, four years after the thing this book is actually pointing at.
Here is what it is pointing at.
Two covers, three years apart
In 1991, riding the noise coming out of Shelley’s, Mixmag made Sasha the first DJ ever to appear on its cover. The headline asked whether he might be the first DJ pinup.
In 1994, after Renaissance and after the Mix Collection had rewritten what a compilation could be, the same magazine put him on the cover again. This time the headline was two words and a question mark:
SON OF GOD?
By every account, he did not enjoy it. He has never been comfortable with the messianic framing — this is a man who describes himself as shy, who does not like talking about himself, and who was being handed a crown by a magazine that needed to shift copies that month.
Which is exactly why the joke works
God is a DJ* — *but he only warms up for Sasha.
It is a wind-up, and it is affectionate, and it lands on the press rather than on him. The asterisk is the whole gag: the grand claim, then the correction underneath in smaller type, deflating it. That is roughly the tone of the entire book, and roughly the tone of the scene it came out of. British dance music has never been able to take a coronation seriously for more than about ninety seconds.
The bit that gets lost
Between those two covers, something genuinely changed and it was not really about one man. In 1991 a DJ was staff. By 1994 a DJ could sell a magazine, headline a tour, and put his name above a club’s. In 2002, Sasha and John Digweed took the Delta Heavy tour to thirty-one American cities and played to eighty-five thousand people with lasers and video walls, and nobody thought that was strange any more.
Somebody had to be first through that door, and the press needed a word for what he had become. “Son of God” was the word they reached for. It was too much, he knew it was too much, and the joke has been sitting there waiting to be made ever since.
This book makes it.