‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’: the strange influence of a dance classic on ‘OK Computer’
It’s been well documented over the years that Radiohead drummer Phil Selway was trying to organically re-create a DJ Shadow style of rhythm during the development of the song ‘Airbag’, the eventual lead track on 1997’s space rock monument OK Computer.
That same song started out with a loose connection to another DJ; however, a nameless hero once celebrated 15 years earlier by the New York dance-pop group Indeep.
When Radiohead first started performing an early version of the song in 1995, it had the working title ‘An Airbag Saved My Life’, an acknowledged tongue-in-cheek reference to 1982’s ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’, by far the biggest hit of Indeep’s brief career in the New York City disco scene.
Thom Yorke actually credited an additional bit of inspiration for the song’s original title, once mentioning that he’d also received a flyer in the post from the AA about driver safety, supposedly using the same headline: ‘An Airbag Saved My Life’.
That might seem like the end of any shared DNA between Radiohead and Indeep, but if you dig into the heavier lyrical themes of ‘Airbag’, it’s weirdly not all that far away in spirit from what Indeep songsmith Michael Cleveland was getting at with his feel-good hit.
Shortly after OK Computer’s release, Yorke spoke about a car crash he and his girlfriend had survived in the late 1980s, and how ‘Airbag’ was largely influenced by the unique emotions he associated with that memory of a near-death moment, the adrenaline, the fear, and the eventual gratefulness.
“Every time you have a near accident,” Yorke told Select magazine, “instead of just sighing and carrying on, you should pull over, get out of the car and run down the street screaming, ‘I’m back! I’m alive! My life has started again today!’ In fact, you should do that every time you get out of a car. We’re just riding on those things, we’re not really in control of them.”
If ‘Airbag’ is a song about the fragility and miracle of life, then who’s to say it wasn’t more inspired by ‘A DJ Saved My Life’ than we initially thought? Just check out these lyrics, sung by Indeep’s Rose Marie Ramsey, and how closely they align with Yorke’s suggestion of never taking anything for granted: “Last night a DJ saved my life / Cause I was sittin’ there bored to death / And in just one breath, he said / You gotta get up, you gotta get on, you gotta get down, girl”.
Thom Yorke is wise enough to know he can’t tell his listeners to “get up and get down” like James Brown, so he translates the sentiment into a Radiohead version of life affirmation: “In an interstellar burst / I’m back to save the universe”.
Ironically, the recording of ‘Airbag’ with producer Nigel Godrich generated a similar feeling of exuberance in Yorke to the one his car crash survival had a decade earlier.
“Nigel played it back really loud, and I thought, ‘This is something we never dreamed we could get done,’” Yorke told Q Magazine in 1997. “I was so happy I rang my girlfriend just to say, ‘Wow, we’ve done something really great.’ That’s the height of the experience.”
