Paul Oakenfold: ”Many of the iconic nightclubs in Britain are being closed down”

HE is the Super DJ who imported rave music from Ibiza, played in front of tens of thousands at Glastonbury and started the first electronic dance clubs in America.

But when Paul Oakenfold recently tried to get into a famous acid house venue he once filled to the rafters with ravers, the bouncers turned him down.

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The 51-year-old opened up about the embarrassing moment as he called on the government to do more to protect British dance history.

He revealed: “The other day I was having dinner with my friend Mickey Jackson on the Strand and I thought, it’s Friday night, Heaven is just over there, we’ve got to go and take a look.

“We walked up to the bouncers on the door and said, I hope you don’t mind, we used to DJ here, do you mind if we come in and have a look around?

“They didn’t know who I was. A couple of people knew the name but they were like, ‘What are you doing here?’ Luckily the management came out and said, ‘Of course you can come in,’ and they walked us around the DJ booth.

“It was mad because the night I put on there, Spectrum, started acid house in Britain. We used to have 4000 kids there on a Monday night and it changed the entire landscape of the country.”

Speaking at his Soho hotel on a rare trip to London from his home in Los Angeles, Oakenfold explained how he is worried that the genesis of dance music is being consigned to the dustbin of history.

He said: “Many of the iconic nightclubs in Britain are being closed down and levelled. In London we had Bagleys, The Cross, Turnmills, in Manchester it was the Hacienda, in Liverpool we had Cream and there was God’s Kitchen and Gatecrasher in Birmingham. They are all gone or going and The Ministry of Sound is holding on for dear life.

“I think, God, these are landmarks. If we don’t document in some form what happened – maybe put a plaque up - the next generation is never going to know.

“If you go back to where the Beatles played, that’s an iconic venue, and they protect it. But you’ve got this whole new wave of young people who are getting into electronic music and they don’t know where it came from. And the birth of where we are now started round the corner!”

Oakenfold was a club DJ and successful A&R producer before his life took a dramatic turn when he travelled to Ibiza to celebrate his 24th birthday.

That was in 1987 and he was so taken with the music he heard on the Balearic island that he organised a reunion party when he got back to London.

This was one of the first times acid house had been played at a UK club and it led to the weekly night called ‘Spectrum at Heaven in Charing Cross’.

“It was underground then,” he explained. “We were really lucky in that we experienced the underground side of the club scene. Today it’s much more commercial.

“Now you can now stand in front of any underground DJ and Shazam what they are playing and have it in an instant.

“I used to spend weeks trying to find these records and if you came to Spectrum you would only hear those tunes once a week as you couldn’t get hold of them. You didn’t even know what they were called.

“The process is much easier now and the shelf life of a great night out is much shorter.”

The dance music scene took off much quicker than anyone expected, led to the first outdoor raves then launched the era of the Super DJ where the men and women spinning the tunes became rock stars with legions of fans.

“It was a movement that Britain embraced, you couldn’t sit round a table and plan it, but you couldn’t hold it back,” Oakenfold said.

“Before Spectrum there was no club on a Monday night that attracted that amount of people. Other promoters told us we were fools and that we would never fill that size of club. But we believed in what we were doing.

“Ibiza changed everything because suddenly people started coming to our nights from all over the country.

“There was a look. Everyone had long hair, converse trainers, Thai baggy trousers, a sweat shirt with a smiley face, because you were dancing all night. I think that style of clothes even ended up in the Victorian and Albert museum.

“Raves took it to a different level. We went from 4000 on a Monday night to 20,000 on a Saturday night.

“It was the first time the crowd would turn round and face the DJ and interact with the DJ. It was like a religious experience.”

In 1995, Oakenfold, who had already started his Perfecto record label, became the first DJ to play on the main stage at Glastonbury for 90,000 people.

Over the next decade he established his reputation as one of most successful DJs and producers in the world, enabling him to demand tens of thousands of pounds for a single gig.

For the son of a newspaper delivery man from working class Mile End in east London, the change in his lifestyle was dramatic.

He said: “It was sex, drugs and rock and roll. I went from being snowed under with debts and charging £100 for a gig, to flying on private jets.

“A lot of my colleagues fell away because of it. There were friends who would stay up all night and take it too far. And some of those people ended up in rehab. But I was lucky because I had a day job – producing music – so I had to learn to behave. I needed to get up in the morning.”

By the end of the 1990s, Oakenfold had been voted the number one DJ in the world twice by DJ magazine.

Yet over the following decade he found a second line of work, writing music for movies - and this convinced him to settle near the Hollywood studios that had become his bread and butter.

His switch to LA might have dampened down his DJ career as hip hop and R&B dominated the club scene there.

But in 2008 he brought dance music to Las Vegas when he started his residency at Rain nightclub at the Palms hotel just off the strip.

The success of that night has helped spread what the yanks call EDM, or Electronic Dance Music, across the States and created the biggest rave festival on the planet in Sin City.

“Vegas is just a repeat of what happened in Ibiza,” Oakenfold said. “It’s huge for electronic music. There are more clubs and parties than anywhere else in the world. It’s ridiculous how big it is.”

In recent years Oakenfold has seen his fame eclipsed by younger DJs like Calvin Harris and DJ Tiesto.

Tiesto, placed at the top of the DJ rich list with a net worth of £60 million, is valued at roughly £20 million more on paper than Oakenfold, who is ranked 5th in the league.

But the Brit has no hard feelings about this and accepts he is probably going to hang up his mixing gloves in the next 10 years or so.

“Good luck to them,” he said. “I know I can’t carry on forever. It’s the travelling that really takes it out of me.

“I have a lot of respect for Calvin Harris as he is a great, great producer.

“But I do worry that some of the artistry in DJing is dying off. I used to lug my records around in a big bag. Now you just have to plug your thing into the computer and off you go.

“A lot of people think, ‘I can be a DJ, I can press play.’ You can’t. You still have to tell a story. You still need talent to be good.”