Frankie Knuckles

Known as The Godfather of House Music, Frankie Knuckles was a DJ, producer and remixer who ushered a new age of dance music at the top of the ‘80s with hedonistic collisions of classic disco and thumping drum machines. Francis Warren Nicholls Jr. was born in The Bronx in 1955. Black and openly gay, he began nightclubbing as a teen, attracted to the freedom revellers could find on a crowded dance floor. He relocated to Chicago in 1977 and started DJing at the exclusive club Warehouse, honing a popular cocktail of disco favourites, soul rarities and European synth-pop. In 1983, he purchased a drum machine to punch up his mixes, which gave early house its distinctive, looping percussion. Around this time he met singer Jamie Principle, collaborating on the foundational 1986 house track “Your Love” and reconnecting for 1987’s tragic anthem “It's a Cold World”. Knuckles released two studio albums, Beyond the Mix (1991) and Welcome to the Real World (1995), which synthesised his vision for hypnotic dance music on cuts like “The Whistle Song” and “Passion & Pain”. His exuberant residencies at London's Heaven and New York's Sound Factory have become mythical, while his remixes of Diana Ross and Luther Vandross continued spinning long after his death in 2014.