Paul Oakenfold’s musical career started from admirably
humble beginnings, playing soul and rare groove cuts in a Covent
Garden wine bar in the late ‘seventies with mate Trevor
Fung. By the early ‘eighties, having decided that NYC
was the place, Paul decamped there armed only with the chutzpah
to blag his way into a courier’s job in West Harlem. At
that time, more than any other, New York was bursting with musical
invention: hip-hop was the freshest street sound around, and
Larry Levan – arguably the first ever superstar DJ, inspiring
a frenzy in the crowd that some guy playing records had never
inspired before - was packing out the Paradise Garage every
week with the revolutionary, hypnotic mixing style that would
become the acid house DJ’s stock in trade.
Returning to London, Paul became one of the UK’s leading
authorities on hip-hop. During his stint as an A&R man for
Champion he signed the as-then unknowns Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh
Prince, and Salt N’Pepa. Oh yeah, and he appeared on Blue
Peter with a breakdancing crew who he was looking after at the
time.
In 1985 young Paul spent the summer on a beautiful Balearic
island called Ibiza. Ever heard of it? Oakey is as much responsible
as anyone for making it the clubber’s paradise it is today,
as two years after that first trip he, alongside mates Trevor
Fung, Nicky Holloway, Ian St Paul, Danny Rampling and Johnny
Walker, went there for a week to celebrate his birthday. If
the first visit had been good, this one changed their lives
forever. Dancing in the warm night air beneath stars at the
then open-air Amnesia to the oddest mix of music any of them
had ever heard, courtesy of island legend Alfredo, Paul’s
urge to import this incredible experience – and the Balearic
sound – back to England became too great to resist.
........Acid House Explosion
Prior to his Ibiza trip, Paul had been running a successful
soul/jazz night at The Project in Streatham. On his return from
the white island he persuaded the owner to let him run an after-hours
‘Ibiza reunion’ party. An attempt at a Balearic
music policy had failed Paul one year earlier: the crowd just
hadn’t been ready to hear so many musical styles mixed
together in one night, let alone in one DJ’s set, but
by 1987, and coupled with Paul’s sheer enthusiasm and
showman’s talent for setting a musical mood, attitudes
were changing. The night was a complete success, and led to
what was to be – alongside Danny Rampling’s Shoom
– one of London’s, and England’s, first major
acid house nights: Spectrum at Heaven in Charing Cross.
Spectrum grew out of Future, a night held in The Sanctuary,
which annexed the much bigger Heaven club. Many never thought
Spectrum (suitably subtitled ‘Theatre Of Madness’)
would succeed: a 1500+ capacity club on a Monday night? Forget
about it. And at first they looked to be right. For the first
few weeks, attendance was low, leaving Paul and co-promoter
Ian St Paul in dire financial straits. Then, suddenly, the vibe
was out and the queues were literally going around the block.
And a new phase in club culture had begun.
Spectrum continued for a couple of years, changing its name
along the way to Land Of Oz. New initiates to the scene (as
almost everybody was) marvelled at the full-on atmosphere of
the place: hands reaching up into the sweat hazed air, laser
lights pulsing and washing over the smiling crowd. Alex Paterson
(later of The Orb) DJed in the VIP chillout area (the White
Room), while Paul created his now trademark fervour in the cavernous
main room.
Alongside running a seminal club night, Paul’s production
career had also begun by 1988 under the name Electra, working
with long-time collaborator Steve Osborne. By 1990, with his
work on The Happy Mondays’ frugadelic Wrote For Luck and
then Hallelujah (on the Madchester Rave On EP), Paul had created
two of the cornerstone records of the indie-dance scene, a hybrid
that demystified acid house for kids who’d been raised
on a musical diet of guitar, bass, and drums. Paul was one of
the guest DJs at The Stone Roses’ legendary Spike Island
gig, and his work with Osborne on The Happy Mondays’ classic
Pills, Thrills And Bellyaches LP (NME’s 1990 Album Of
The Year) won the pair the 1991 Brit Award for Best Producer.
Remix galore followed, for Mondays labelmates New Order; Massive
Attack; The Shamen, and Arrested Development among others, as
Paul and Steve began trading under the name Perfecto. If the
name was little known at first that soon changed with the 1992
Perfecto mix of U2’s Even Better Than The Real Thing.
The track, with delicious irony, attained a higher chart position
on release than the original song, thus signalling a watershed
in the history and growth of dance music.
..........Superstar DJ!
1993 saw Paul hired to provide the warm-up sonics on U2’s
Zoo TV world tour, and as a result the de facto arrival of the
superstar DJ. The past decade has seen Paul rack up a dizzying
blur of firsts and foremosts, including, not least, his being
voted the number one DJ in the world by the readers of DJ magazine,
and has heard the name “Oakey!” yelled hoarsely
from clubs, fields (including an epoch-making set on the main
stage at Glastonbury Festival, no less) and arenas in every
corner of the globe.
On the production front Paul began to release his own tracks
as well as continuing to turn in remixes, while Perfecto expanded
into a fully-fledged label. Its offshoot, Perfecto Fluoro, became
the label of choice in the mid-‘nineties for the harder,
trippier Goa trance sound. Today Perfecto boasts artists as
diverse as Arthur Baker, Harry ‘Choo Choo’ Romero,
and Timo Maas on its roster, and has gone from strength to strength
by refusing to pander to only one style of dance music. Alongside
the building of the Perfecto brand, Paul released a string of
superlative mix CD’s, amongst them his awesome New York
set for Global Underground – still the series’ biggest
seller to date. And who else would have been commissioned to
write the theme for what was certain to be the biggest TV show
of all time? How did you guess? Paul wrote and produced the
Big Brother theme, as Element 4, with Andy Gray.
On the club front, well, time for a deep breath...Ready? OK,
here we go: Paul undertook a legendary two-year residence at
Liverpool’s Cream that took residencies in general to
another level, from the personally designed DJ booth to die-hard
fans (dubbed ‘the Oakenfolk’ in the press) who would
travel the length and breadth of the country week in, week out
to hear him whip up a magical musical storm, that would still
be ringing in the ears and exciting the mind in the office or
the lecture hall on Monday morning. Ever keen to push himself
further and harder, Paul decamped in 1999 to become Director
of Music at home, the multi-million pound superclub built defiantly
– and, as it turned out, problematically – in Leicester
Square, the heart of London’s West End. That club’s
immediate downturn in popularity after Paul’s departure
goes to show the extent of his impact and following. There are
but a handful of DJ’s in the world who attract the fervour
and create the excitement that he is capable of provoking in
a crowd. You only have to be there when he plays to feel the
electric charge in the atmosphere, more akin to the devotional
than the merely appreciative.
Leaving home was a difficult decision for Paul, but he risked
his UK and European profile, not to mention turning down the
certainty of serious amounts of cash, to decamp to America,
one of the few places in the world – ironically, given
that it all started there – where dance music is yet to
be championed and grasped in the way in which it is elsewhere
around the globe. But this was a move typical of the man: where
others would sit on their laurels and bathe in their hard-won
glory, he has always taken the tougher option, sustained by
his belief that greater effort means greater rewards. It’s
this attitude that saw him leave a huge fanbase in Britain to
start all over again in the U.S.; that has seen him play to
crowds in the low hundreds in isolated Alaska; and that led
him to take a pair of Technics with him when he went on holiday
to Cuba, and organise a free, unpromoted and not strictly legal
party, purely to spread the word of great, life-affirming music
and good, good times. This man lives, breathes and eats his
art.
Paul Oakenfold is the UK’s number one DJ. This simple
statement, however, doesn’t even begin to properly acknowledge
Oakenfold’s stellar contribution to our musical landscape.
His signature can be seen in everything from the early rise
of hip-hop and the re-invention of British dance culture to
the Balearic explosion and the birth of ‘Madchester’.
Indeed, it’s a testament to Oakenfold’s restless
curiosity and imagination that his career shows no signs of
diminution, even after two decades. A snapshot of his activities
through the summer of 2001, for instance, finds Oakenfold hosting
Perfecto nights in Ibiza before travelling to America where
he’s the headline DJ on Moby’s ambitious Area:One
festival tour. After that, there are DJ dates everywhere from
Buenos Aires and Mexico City to Clapham Common.
Oakenfold has also contributed the soundtrack to America’s
number one box-office movie, Swordfish, the release of which
is closely followed by the Perfecto Presents Paul Oakenfold
in Ibiza DJ mix album this summer. A relentless schedule that
emphasises Oakenfold’s growing global status.
All this began in the late-Seventies when a very young Paul
Oakenfold, together with his friend Trevor Fung, cut their musical
teeth by mixing soul and rare-groove at a basement bar in London’s
Covent Garden. His imagination stirred, Oakenfold decided to
find the roots of his new-found obsession by moving to West
Harlem in New York.
Oakenfold worked as a courier for local dance radio stations
in the Big Apple. By night he checked out the city’s burgeoning
new club environment, witnessing the extraordinary birth of
hip-hop. Fired up, Oakenfold was determined to break into the
music industry.
Returning to London, Paul landed a job as an A&R man at
Champion Records. He had a keen ear and quickly signed Jazzy
Jeff & the Fresh Prince - the latter, of course, to be subsequently
revealed as Will Smith - and Salt n’ Pepa.
From Champion, Oakenfold moved to the London offices of Profile
and Def Jam. By this time, however, he was increasingly interested
in DJ’ing and producing, twin ambitions that were soon
to be amply fulfilled.
In 1987 Paul, together with fellow-DJs Danny Rampling, Nicky
Holloway and Ian St Paul, travelled to the Balearic island of
Ibiza for a summer holiday. At that time the island was a hippie-inspired
community with an over-indulgent club scene. The sunshine was
great, however, and the bars plentiful. There was potential
for a vivid new underground scene, although no one realised
at the time just how Ibiza would come to dominate club culture
in years to come.
Paul returned to England with a new Balearic house sound. He
began running regular club nights in London, most particularly
Spectrum of the Future at Heaven. The club became the fulcrum
of a new dance attitude, attracting not only the regular London
crews but also out of town rock musicians, including the Manchester
bands, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.
Despite his dance music reputation, Oakenfold had always been
an eclecticist at heart, growing up with an equal affection
for rock and pop music. Through the latter part of the Eighties,
however, rock had become increasingly irrelevant to a new generation
fuelled on the underground explosion of club culture. Its presence
permeated everything, from illicit activities through to language
and fashion, thus it was inevitable that dance music itself
would exert a revitalising influence on rock.
In 1989 Paul and his production partner Steve Osborne were
asked to produce Happy Mondays, a band on the seminal Manchester
label, Factory. The result was the Madchester Rave On EP, a
mash-up of dance, indie, funk and pop that acted as a catalyst
for the ‘baggy’ scene, along the way inspiring a
whole string of bands in Manchester and beyond. It preceded
the biggest album of the band’s career, the Oakenfold
/ Osborne produced Pills ‘N’ Thrills and Bellyaches
in 1990.
It was the start of a long connection between Oakenfold and
rock music. He was, for instance, the DJ at The Stone Roses’
historic Spike Island concert and, along with Osborne, remixed
such bands as New Order, The Cure and Massive Attack. Indeed,
the Oakenfold / Osborne team were nominated by the BPI as Best
Producers in 1990.
A year later, in 1991, Oakenfold was approached by U2, who
were then finishing the Achtung Baby album. Paul ended up remixing
Even Better Than the Real Thing and Mysterious Ways, giving
the band an entirely new dimension. Indeed, Oakenfold’s
mix of Even Better Than the Real Thing was released as a single
in its own right, reaching higher in the UK chart than U2’s
original version. These activities were the start of a very
long partnership with the band which, most recently, resulted
in the remixed Beautiful Day, a number one hit for U2 in the
American dance charts.
