Paul Oakenfold: Past and Present

Image: Paul Oakenfold @ Cream Ibiza Credit: James Chapman

What hasn't Paul Oakenfold done down the years? Not content with bringing back the sound of Ibiza to London in the late eighties, he went on to become a household name through his residency at Cream in the nineties, and via his legendary trance label, Perfecto Records.

Then he surprised everyone by uprooting to the US, where he continued to rise into the stratosphere by composing scores for Hollywood films, working with the likes of Madonna and U2, and producing a whole host of music that appeared in charts, computer games and TV shows the world over.

Nowadays he can content himself with being a key member/originator of the burgeoning Vegas scene, but as we discussed with him, he will still always find time to go back to his roots with Cream, particularly when he returns to The Courtyard for their Birthday on Saturday October 11th.

How much does it mean to you to still be able to play to a Cream crowd at Creamfields, after all these years?

Cream, as a lot of people know, was very much part of my DJing career… growing up being a resident at Cream in Liverpool, Cream in Ibiza, Creamfields… the whole Cream family are good people, but most importantly the clubbers.

Through all the years I've been very lucky to have played to so many great crowds, to people who used to come every Saturday to the club in Liverpool, so it means a hell of a lot.

And in terms of the Creamfields crowd, are you still seeing some of the old faces that you knew from the days of Cream in Liverpool?

Yeah, the regulars that used to come to Cream, every week standing in the same place in the courtyard and the annex, they became friends, and they still are to this day.

It must be nice seeing that combined with a younger generation...

Yeah, it's wonderful. Great to see.

I can remember when you stopped being a Cream resident and went over to the US, British magazines gave you a right pasting for it. Despite the fact the UK scene has its roots in America, they saw our own scene as the greatest and the most innovative, so it was crazy that you would decide to leave and do something else.

But now do you feel that when you come back over and play something like Creamfields, that the scenes you've been a part of, like Las Vegas, are actually teaching the UK a thing or two about how big room dance music should be done?

In some respects they are. It's a fresh scene out there. It is different in America… you tend to see a lot of the DJs going over there now. I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to go to America and write music for movies, and it was a big challenge for me - I didn't even know whether I'd be able to do that. But I just had to try. And it worked.

With doing that, and still really wanting to DJ I ended up taking my residency in Vegas against what a lot of other people were doing at the time - Vegas was very commercial - but I just felt Vegas needed electronic music, and that's what I did.

From my perspective, I think that the production value of the kind of events you'd play at in the UK has gone up markedly in recent years - especially the grand nature of lighting rigs - do you think Vegas has something to do with that?

Yes. Insomniac, the production company behind big events like Electric Daisy Carnival in Vegas... they've partnered up with Creamfields, so yeah - I have noticed that. The production across the board is better, and it gives the clubber a much more enjoyable experience, and better value for money.

A mate of mine who used to work at Cream when you were resident said that for a year or two, he'd hear you play what was to become Planet Perfecto 'Bullet in the gun' (hear the modern-day remix is above), and that nobody else in the world had it, and that no one had a clue about the back story of the song, other than the fact you played it.

Even if this is an exaggeration, I love the romance of the notion that you could only go to one venue to see one DJ play a particular song - kinda like a Northern Soul outlook on things - but in this day an age, it strikes me as harder to build up that mystique. So what do you do nowadays to try and make your sets and music unique, and build a buzz?

You're friend's absolutely right, and it wasn't just that record - there were a bunch of others. I deliberately sat on those records and played them every week at Cream to build a really strong buzz.

The way to do it I guess is to make the records yourself. That was the way and mean to break records in those days - to not let anyone else have them. You can still do that, but it's much more difficult now, because people bootleg them, somehow people get them.

But you must still attempt to where possible?

Yes, absolutely.

Onto Trance Mission... firstly I'd like to say that I loved it. I haven't listened to much trance since a lot of the tracks that you featured on there were out, but I thought the mixed part of the album was brilliantly put together.

Oh, cheers.

You're welcome! But there will be people of my age that think that perhaps these tunes belong to a different era and a different time, and maybe they should be left alone. What would you say to them?

I understand that. First and foremost, I really respect the integrity of those original tracks. The reason it came about was that late last year I did a tour of the US of smaller venues and a lot of people were coming up and asking me for some of the classics and I'd say "this is isn't that kind of a tour - I want to play new tracks and fresh music".

But from that tour the idea came of taking some of these classics - and some of them aren't just trance classics, like that Simple Minds track, they are a few that aren't - but they're all big records for me. (hear below his version of the legendary Grace - 'Not Over Yet' that features on the album)

The idea was to cover them with a 2014 production sound and keep the integrity of the original, but freshen it up for a new generation of clubbers that never heard these records first time around. The reaction has been really really good. And you know, people would listen to the new version and then go off and find the original.

So do you feel duty bound to educate your audience a bit?

I've been very fortunate and the scene has been wonderful to me down the years, and I want to support it where I can, so I thought it would be a great idea to support some of these songs and show them to a new generation.

Paul Oakenfold returns to the Courtyard of Nation on Saturday 11th October alongside Paul Van Dyk for a trance masterclass. For Cream tickets follow the ticketbox below, and find out more information about the Birthday here.

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