Frankie Knuckles: godfather of house music, priest of the dancefloor

The DJ and producer, who died this week, frowned upon the chemical excesses of the nightclubs where he spent his life and made his name, but he understood the dancefloor and changed music for ever

Frankie Knuckles obituary
Frankie Knuckles - house pioneer and DJ - dies aged 59
Frankie Knuckles
Frankie Knuckles Djing at Pacha in Ibiza, 2012. Photograph: Steve Black/REX

In 1987, Francis Nichols released a single called Let the Music Use You. As a DJ and producer, he'd long gone under the name Frankie Knuckles, but Let the Music Use You came out under the name the NightWriters. Dance music aficionados can argue interminably over which of the legendary singles Frankie Knuckles produced in the late 80s – singles, you can say without fear of contradiction, that played a part in changing the face of pop music for ever – is the best. Some plump for Your Love, with its distinctive keyboard figure that subsequently turned up both on Candi Staton and the Source's endlessly reissued and covered 1991 hit You Got The Love and, of all things, psychedelic rock band Animal Collective's My Girls. Others favour the luxuriant sleaze of Baby Wants To Ride or 1989's gorgeous, lovelorn Tears. But Let the Music Use You is always somewhere near the top: some people will tell you it's not just the best record Frankie Knuckles ever made, but the greatest ever example of house music, the genre that was named after The Warehouse, the Chicago gay club where Knuckles was resident DJ from 1977 to 1982.

The euphoria you can feel on a dancefloor is a notoriously tough thing to capture or even describe: that's why most nightclub scenes in films or in TV drama are so awful and why most accounts of a legendary club or rave fall so short. There's almost nothing to Let the Music Use You – a bassline, an unchanging rhythm track based around an insistent synthetic cowbell noise, a two-note keyboard part, a synthesiser that shifts from a melancholy wash of sound into a delirious, joyful ascending chord sequence and a vocal by a forgotten singer called Ricky Dillard who sounds, for the most part, as if he's making it up on the hoof – and yet it captures that weird, ineffable dancefloor transcendence perfectly.

Knuckles would doubtless have told you that what Let the Music Use You captured was spirituality. He had a marked tendency to talk about music in religious terms: packed solid with sweating dancers, The Warehouse may have looked like "a pit of hell" but in fact the club was "a church" with a "soulful" atmosphere. He wasn't the inventor of house music, he was its "godfather". Indeed, there was a faint hint of the clergyman about Knuckles himself. For a DJ who presided over some notorious bacchanals – he first came to prominence in the mid-70s, playing alongside his best friend Larry Levan at New York's infamous Continental Baths, a club with steam rooms, pool and private apartments that one patron described as most closely resembling "an orgy" with added music – and who began his nightclub career as a gopher employed to hand out LSD to dancers at a disco called The Gallery, he could be curiously puritanical. Initially, he refused to even set foot in the Continental Baths, let alone play there. He hated people drinking in clubs: "Alcohol is a completely different kind of drug that puts people in the wrong frame of mind, they bring that bad energy in there." He frowned on the kind of rampant drug use that characterised The Warehouse's big competitor, The Music Box: "I wouldn't allow those type of things to happen in my club," he told one interviewer, firmly.

But a more prosaic response to Let the Music Use You might be to say that Knuckles implicitly understood what happened on a nightclub dancefloor because he spent virtually his entire life in nightclubs. He had intended to become a fashion designer, but by his mid-teens, he and Levan were already fixtures on New York's nascent gay disco scene. He got his first DJing job aged 16 at a Times Square club called Better Days, although he called the three years he spent playing at the Continental Baths his "education". After the club closed in 1976, he moved to Chicago and The Warehouse, taking the kind of DJ techniques common in New York, but unheard of elsewhere, with him.

Within a few years of his arrival, The Warehouse had become both hugely popular and a weird kind of anachronism. When the disco backlash came, and other clubs in Chicago switched to playing new wave rock or European synth pop, Knuckles remained steadfastly devoted to the original sound. His stubbornness forced him to be inventive. As there were few new records being released that fitted the style he wanted to play, he began re-editing old ones to freshen them up, splicing tape to make their instrumental passages longer, or snatches of vocal repeat over and over again, adding new sounds, playing them in the club with a drum machine underneath them to alter the sound of the beat: at first, he used the rhythm settings on a home organ – the mind boggles a bit as to what that must have sounded like – but soon moved on to the Roland TR-909. The sound of the club was so unique that it attracted its own name. Knuckles claimed that he had never heard of house music until he passed a Chicago bar with a poster in the window claiming they played it: on inquiring what it meant, he was told: "It's the stuff you play."

It soon came to mean something else: the writer and dance music historian Bill Brewster memorably described the first house records as crude attempts to copy the music Knuckles played, "made by amateurs, on machines as close to toys as they were to musical instruments". Now resident at a club called The Power Plant, Knuckles himself soon followed them into the studio, but his records were anything but crude. He took with him not just an innate understanding of what made people dance, but a love of songs rather that what he called "beat tracks". A lot of his records boasted a distinct gospel influence. He had brought them to London with him in 1987, when he played a summer residency at the gay club Heaven to a mixed response: the capital's clubs were still largely soundtracked by hip-hop and funk. A few months later, however, Shoom opened: as it turned out, Knuckles' records inadvertently chimed perfectly with its euphoric ecstasy-fuelled atmosphere.

Acid house turned Knuckles from a local legend to a real star, albeit one who never really had a hit of his own – his biggest success in Britain, the sublime Whistle Song, got to number 17 in 1991 – and who fell foul of the legendarily dubious business practices of Chicago's local record-label bosses: when fans turned up asking for autographs, he refused if they proffered any of the singles he'd made on the celebrated, but notoriously shady Trax label. He parlayed the global success of the music he had helped invent into a high-profile remixing career – Madonna and Michael Jackson were clients, his astonishing reworking of Sounds Of Blackness' 1992 single The Pressure was the perfect example of what he could do – but stopped making records altogether in the late 90s, fearing his style of music had become outmoded in an era of hard house and trance, and had to have his foot amputated in 2008 following a snowboarding accident. But around the same time, he was lured back into producing. His remix of Hercules and Love Affair's Blind showed a man with his powers utterly undiminished by the passage of time.

The world of music had changed dramatically since Knuckles had turned up in Chicago: he had helped change it. But in the best way possible, Knuckles had stayed exactly the same. To the end, he still implicitly understood what happened on a dancefloor, and how to make it happen.

Frankie Knuckles obituary
Frankie Knuckles - house pioneer and DJ - dies aged 59