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ever say that DJ Mag USA isn’t willing to admit its shortcomings. “I remember when we flew one of your colleagues over for my residency in Vegas a few years ago and he destroyed us,” opens Paul Oakenfold,
the UK-born, LA-based dance music veteran, when we call him to discuss his new single, ‘Touch the Sky’, released as The Concrete Sneakers alongside ex-Bros singer Matt Goss. “He said Vegas will never happen. He was like, ‘It’s full of old people’, and he completely missed the point. He said, ‘It won’t happen in America’.”
Clearly, from the perspective of 2013, nothing could be further from the truth. Electronic music, whatever you choose to call it, is everywhere — from prime time TV to the nation’s largest venues, and Vegas is its teeming hub, pool parties and giant state of the art clubs providing an outlet for the city’s high rollers to flash their cash. Then again, Paul Oakenfold has a history of prescience. Moving to New York and living on 54th Street at the same time that Studio 54’s disco decadence was ensuring its infamy, he also signed DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince and Salt-N-Pepa while working as an A&R for Champion Records. It was his 1987 trip to Ibiza, however — where he encountered house music — that helped set off the acid house revolution in the UK when he returned to England and launched the club Spectrum. This eventually led to the launch of Perfecto Records, still going strong today with an output ranging from melodic house to trance, and his involvement with various era-defining bands, first remixing the Happy Mondays, later working with and warming up on tour for U2 (his remix of ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing’ charted higher than the band’s original version) and Madonna, whose MDMA tour he has also just returned from. Yet when we broach the subject of EDM’s newest fans having no idea of dance music’s illustrious past, something that he’s had a hand in at every stage in his career, he’s unbothered and unsentimental. “I don’t look back,” he says, without hesitation. “I’m all about being in the moment of now and looking to the future.”
MOVIE SCORES
He came and kick-started dance music in Las Vegas, but after leaving his weekly Vegas residency what is Paul Oakenfold up to next? We sat down and talked about his forthcoming album, late night after-parties and the importance of sticking to your guns...
Words: JOE ROBERTS 016
djmag.com
It was the lure of movie scores that brought Paul to LA nine years ago, something that — as in so much he’s done — he slipped into with apparent ease, coming over initially for Swordfish but then working on shows like Californication and films including The Bourne Identity and Speed Racer. “I was very lucky to get an opportunity to score movies,” he says, taking a moment to reflect. “I took a big step back from DJing, but I still loved it so I went to Vegas and everyone said there was no house music there... I was like, ‘I don’t care, I just really think something’s there, I can see it’. You’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to focus and build an infrastructure that works... you’ve got to put the work in and a lot of people don’t want to put the work in.” There’s no doubting Paul’s work ethic or adaptability, but when he started his Planet Perfecto weekly residency at Rain nightclub at the Palms in 2008, there were probably many who failed to see the opportunities inherent in the city — apparently one of our own reviewers included. “You can get away with things in Las Vegas that you can’t anywhere else,” explains Paul, who had also looked at Miami and New York to lay down roots but rejected them in favour of Sin City. “We had real fire in the club, we had artificial snow.” “I would definitely say that in North America, it’s what we had in Ibiza,” he continues when we question a comparison that he’s made publicly in the past with Europe’s party island. “It’s the capital of electronic
music in North America... You’ve got pool parties nearly every night, there are international DJs, all the big DJs have got residencies, there are new clubs opening and there is an electronic radio station. Everything’s happening now.”
GAMBLING
It’s hard to question the city’s place as an entertainment Mecca, a teeming 24-hour hive where all manner of pleasures are available for the right price, but when stories emerge of even Calvin Harris — hardly a bastion of the underground — being asked to leave the decks by list and bottle VIPs because his music isn’t commercial enough, where does the culture Vegas has created sit with rave culture’s ever further distant credo of PLUR? “First of all it is a gambling city,” says Paul, defensively, “there are always going to be people with money, that’s what the foundations of that city is built on. The big shift in Ibiza in the last two to three years has been the influx of money and the higher market. There is a whole scene in Ibiza that doesn’t touch any of the nightclubs, that goes there now and spends a lot of money and that’s the same kind of crowd.” The flip-side, of course, to dance music’s current position of soundtrack du jour to the rich and fickle is its adoption by a generation genuinely moved by the force of repetitive beats on a packed dancefloor. The argument, or perhaps hope, from US producers experiencing the whole phenomenon of EDM from the underground is that at least some of the kids currently dancing in the front rows of big festivals will eventually start to dig a little deeper for less pre-packed thrills.
AFTER-HOURS
In the last year Paul has switched from Vegas nightclub parties (“suddenly you’ve got twenty other DJs playing the same night”) to daytime pool parties at the Hard Rock, but he’s noticed a shift from a love of ‘the ‘Big Room’ sound — as they call it in Vegas. Case in point, we anticipate, is Eric Prdyz’s residency at Black Dice, which started at the beginning of February. “That should be interesting. I’ve always thought eventually Vegas was going to get sick of hearing the same music, so look for something deeper, and that is exactly what he is saying. I was looking at doing a residency, a new one, but playing an all-night after-hours, like starting at six and going to midday — like the old days in Ibiza.” It’s this idea that seems to ignite Oakenfold the most, the frontier spirt of his youthful experimentation transplanted smack-bang in the middle of the modern zeitgeist. Throwing names like Hernan Cattaneo, Luciano and John Digweed around, all that’s holding him back, he says, is time. Because time is something in short supply for a man with a his fingers in as many pies as Paul. For a start there’s ‘Touch The Sky’ (out now on Perfecto Records), a rousing anthem that uses the gold standard of any dance anthem — arms being held aloft to the sky — as its self-fulfilling main vocal hook. With remixes from Disfunktion, Faustix & Imanos and Flesh & Bone, it marks the second single from Paul’s relaxed working relationship with Matt, the two united by their South London upbringing relocated to the States. “I don’t think there is any pressure on either of us,” says Paul, “we just take it how it comes and see how it goes really.”
ARTIST ALBUM
More pressing is his third artist album ‘Pop Killer’, due for release by Sony, which he promises “is very near finished”. Like previous releases it’s packed with guests, many of them rising, yet still relatively new,
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