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Paul Oakenfold

Birth Place: London, England, UK
Date of Birth: August 30, 1963
Heritage: British


Two years ago, just as the new millennium was starting, Paul Oakenfold decided to get back to his roots. Oakenfold was very probably the world’s leading DJ and certainly one of the crucial figures in the relentless rise of club culture, yet there was still no album that truly represented his own personal landscape and musical vision. Despite his long and distinguished work as a re-mixer and producer, the real Oakenfold had still to be revealed as an artist.

“For the past 10 years I’ve been creating music under various different names, but I was never comfortable with putting out an Oakenfold record,” he says. “It was, however, an idea that I’d been thinking about for a long time and Steve Osborne, my colleague in some of the production work I was doing at the time, kept putting pressure on me, saying ‘you should do it, you should do it’. So eventually I felt it was time to make that record.”

The result is Bunkka, the first genuine Paul Oakenfold album, released by Perfecto Records in the summer of 2002. It is an album that will confront most people’s pre-conceptions of Paul Oakenfold. While much of the musical vocabulary is borrowed from dance technology, Bunkka is no conventional dance album. “I’d always wanted to do something that represented by own musical background,” he says. “I grew up on pop music, I love guitar bands and I was very influenced and involved in hip-hop during the early days, so I wanted to build from those roots upwards rather than doing a contemporary dance record.”

By his own admission, however, Oakenfold is no singer. To help realise his ambition he enlisted a disparate collection of talents, ranging from Jane’s Addiction vocalist Perry Farrell and Shifty Shellshock of Los Angeles rock-rap band Crazy Town to Ice Cube, Tricky and Nelly Furtado.

There are also contributions from Asher D of So Solid Crew and Grant Lee Philips, founder of 90’s LA rock band, Grant Lee Buffalo. Bunkka also provides a platform for three rising young vocalists, Carla Werner, Tiff Lacey and Emiliana Torrini, although the album’s most surprising contributor is Hunter S. Thompson, the infamous creator of gonzo journalism and the author of ‘Fear & Loathing in Los Vegas’.

This sheer diversity of this music, and his eclectic choice of contributors, shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, Oakenfold’s restless imagination has been evident throughout his career. 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’.

Most recently, Oakenfold’s talents have also been recognised by the American film industry. Oakenfold scored the music for John Travolta’s 2001 movie, Swordfish, and also contributed to director Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes.

His career began in London at the end of the Seventies, when Oakenfold learned the DJ craft in small clubs around the city’s West End. Oakenfold’s rising reputation led to a job as an A&R man at the UK-based Champion Records where his first signing was Will Smith, then performing as the latter half of Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. Oakenfold’s second was Salt n’ Pepa.

From Champion, Oakenfold moved to the London offices of the Profile and Def Jam record companies. By this time, however, Oakenfold priority reverted to his DJ career, an ambition soon to be amply fulfilled.

Oakenfold changed European youth culture in the late-Eighties and early-Nineties. He was among the first DJs to start regular club sessions on the Spanish island of Ibiza, leading to a new sound in dance music and the now annual pilgrimage of European youth to the island each summer.

Oakenfold also started regular ‘Balearic’ club nights in London, attracting not only the regular London dance audience but also a cross-over of youth culture and styles, including the UK rock bands Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses which were subsequently to become pivotal in influencing British popular music.

In 1989 Oakenfold and his production partner Steve Osborne were asked to produce Happy Mondays. The result was the Madchester Rave On EP, a record that inspired a whole generation of UK artists. 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 the DJ at several significant British rock concerts and, along with Osborne, re-mixed such UK bands as New Order, The Cure and Massive Attack. Indeed, the Oakenfold / Osborne team were nominated by the BPI – the UK equivalent of the American Grammy Awards - as Best Producers in 1990.

A year later, in 1991, Oakenfold was approached by U2, who were then finishing the Achtung Baby album. He ended up re-mixing 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 Oakenfold’s very long partnership with the band. He was, for instance, invited to DJ on the historic ZOO TV tour and, most recently, Oakenfold re-mixed Beautiful Day, a number one hit for U2 in the American dance charts.

Determined to control his own destiny, Oakenfold launched his own UK record label, Perfecto, in 1990. In the subsequent years, Perfecto has been not only a conduit for Oakenfold’s own re-mix activities but also a platform for new talent, encouraging such European DJ talents as Timo Maas and Hernan Cattaneo.

As a re-mixer, Oakenfold has been attributed with an enormous number of credits, working with everyone from Arrested Development and Snoop Doggy Dogg to Madonna, for whom he re-mixed, What It Feels Like For A Girl.

It is now probable that Oakenfold is the world’s number one DJ, if there was any precise way of quantifying such a claim. Certainly, Oakenfold has travelled the world – among the places he’s played are Anchorage in Alaska; Beijing; Bombay; Rio de Janeiro; Buenos Aires; Punta del Este in Uruguay; South Korea; Macao in China; Manila in the Philippines; Johannesburg; Egypt and Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam.

Running concurrently with his burgeoning film career, Oakenfold recently had
five albums in the American Top 50 Electronic Chart. They included Perfecto Presents Another World which, when released at the end of 2000, became America’s biggest-ever DJ mix album. Oakenfold was also the headline DJ on Moby’s massively ambitious Area:One travelling festival tour of North America last summer.

So how will the dance crew accept Bunkka? “I hope they realise that in any forms of music you need to push the boundaries,” says Oakenfold. “I’ve been inspired by all kinds of music, from hip-hop to guitars to dance, and hopefully the dance audience will understand that.”