Smokin Jo’s DJ career starts with exactly the sort of story you want from this era. She was working at the Junior Gaultier shop in Soho, making mixtapes because she loved the records, not because anybody had drawn up a five-year career plan. The shop manager knew Martin Confusion from Trade and, when a DJ was ill, Jo’s name got thrown in.

So she got the chance, played the set and Trade asked her back. That’s it. No social-media campaign, no management launch, no carefully manufactured breakthrough — a tape got into the right hands and then she had to prove herself in the room. Very early-90s, and very rave.

Trade at Turnmills was no gentle place to learn. It was an after-hours club rooted in London’s LGBTQ+ scene, getting going when plenty of other nights were chucking people out. The crowd knew its records, stayed for hours and would happily go harder or stranger than a mainstream Saturday-night room. If you couldn’t hold that floor, everybody knew pretty quickly.

Jo has said Trade gave her the confidence to play what she wanted, and you can understand why. Once you’ve learned to work a crowd like that, there isn’t much point trying to become somebody else’s idea of what a woman DJ should play. Her sound became tough, driving and properly built for long sessions — not a watered-down version of the blokes on the same flyer.

In 1992 she won DJ Magazine’s DJ of the Year, becoming the first woman to receive the award. The recognition arrived astonishingly early in the career, but it reflected how quickly the Trade residency had made her a serious name inside UK house.

A surviving 1992 Trade recording is therefore more than an old mix. It captures the actual environment that created the reputation: Turnmills, after-hours house and a DJ still near the beginning of a career that would stretch for decades.

Once Trade had done its work, the bookings spread: Ministry of Sound, bigger UK rooms and then the international house circuit. British club culture was getting enormous, and Jo was right inside it. She wasn’t being wheeled out as the “female DJ” novelty act; she was getting the same basic test everybody else got when the lights went down — can you actually make this room move?

Ibiza became another long-running part of the story, with Jo associated over the years with places including Space and Manumission. That suited her. This was a DJ built through residencies and long sets, where you could actually take a crowd somewhere, not just turn up for an hour, play the obvious records and disappear.

Her career continued through changing house fashions: deeper records, tribal and tech-house periods, larger festivals and the later revival of terrace-style and classic-house events. Rather than attach herself to one brief microgenre, Jo kept the central idea consistent — strong drums, groove and the ability to work a room over time.

The gender history is unavoidable but should not swallow the music. Jo’s memoir title, You Don’t Need a Dick to DJ, makes the point bluntly because she spent decades being asked to discuss being a woman in an industry where male DJs were simply asked about records. The historic achievement is real; so is the frustration of having competence treated as exceptional because of gender.

In 2024 Jo published her autobiography, You Don’t Need a Dick to DJ, putting the full story — including the parts club biographies usually sand down — into her own words. Two years later she pushed that history forward rather than simply celebrating it: in 2026 she launched the Smokin Jo Scholarship for a UK student studying DJ & Electronic Music Production at ICMP. For somebody whose first break came because one person passed a mixtape to the right room, helping create a new route in for somebody else feels like a proper full-circle move.

In the end, the length of the career tells the story better than any argument about gender ever could. You don’t bluff your way through decades of Trade, Ministry, Ibiza and changing generations of house crowds. Jo kept getting booked because she could DJ. The old tapes are useful because you can hear the proof rather than having to take anybody’s word for it.