Not only does Paul Oakenfold produce records, but he also mixes them. In 1987 he spent several months in Ibiza with a few friends and fell in love with dance club music. Oakenfold produced "Happy Mondays' Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches" before producing for U2, Massive Attack, Simply Red and New Order (to name a few).
In 1999 after building an American fanbase he released "Tranceport" which was widely accepted by American trance fans.
After "Tranceport" came "Perfecto Presents Another World" which was arguably his most successful album, as it introduced millions more to his style.
His popularity grew as many of his works were inclulded in movie soundtracks such as Swordfish, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Die Another Day (where he remixed the James Bond theme before later going to work on the videogame Goldeneye: Rogue Agent in 2004) and Collateral.
In 2002 he released Bunkka, which featured the hit single 'Starry-Eyed Surprise'. In the same year, Oakenfold was listed in Q's "50 Bands to see Before you Die" compilition.
2004 brought about the double album 'Creamfields', but it was in 2005 that he released the Perfecto Album entitled 'Perfecto Presents The Club'.
He also released the album Great Wall, recorded live at the Great Wall of China.
2006 saw the release of 'A Lively Mind' where he colloborated with, amongst others, Brittany Murphy (for the single Faster Kill Pussycat) and Pharrell Williams. 'A Lively Mind' is an edgier, more club-based album, as opposed to his calmer album Bunkka.
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.
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.
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.
So what now for a man at the pinnacle of his profession, the world's premiere DJ? Why, upward, ever upward of course. 2001 has seen Paul score the Joel Silver-produced and John Travolta-starring Swordfish, remix the theme to Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes, DJ on Moby's Arena:One U.S. tour, and make a triumphal return to his home shores with a free gig that left tens of thousands sweat-soaked and grinning like Cheshire Cats on London's Clapham Common. We can only expect that the best is yet to come, so stay tuned and prepare to be amazed.
Swordfish
Paul Oakenfold Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
They make shit.
Unbelievable, unremarkable sshit.
Now I′m not some grungy wannabe filmmaker
That's searching for existentialism
Through a haze of bong smoke or something.
No, it′s easy to pick apart bad acting, short-sighted directing,
No, I'm talking about the lack of realism.
Realism; not a pervasive element in today's modern American cinematic vision.
Take Dog Day Afternoon, for example.
Arguably Pacino′s best work, short of Scarface and Godfather, of course.
Masterpiece of directing, easily Lumet′s best.
The cinematography, the acting, the screenplay, all top-notch.
But... they didn't push the envelope.
Now what if in Dog Day, Sonny REALLY wanted to get away with it?
What if - now here′s the tricky part - what if he started killing hostages right away? No mercy, no quarter.
"Meet our demands or the pretty blonde in the bellbottoms gets it the back of the head." Bam, splat!
What, still no bus? Come on! How many innocent victims splattered across a window would it take to have the city reverse its policy on hostage situations? And this is 1976; there's no CNN, there′s no CNBC, there's no internet!
Now fast forward to today, present time, same situation.
How quickly would the modern media make a frenzy over this?
In a matter of hours, it′d be biggest story from Boston to Budapest!
Ten hostages die, twenty, thirty; bam bam, one after another.
All caught in high-def, computer-enhanced, color corrected.
You can practically taste the brain matter.
All for what? A bus, a plane?
A couple of million dollars that's federally insured?
I don't think so. Just a thought. I mean, it′s not within the realm of conventional cinema... but what if?
In the lyrics of "Swordfish," Paul Oakenfold seems to critique contemporary Hollywood's lack of realism. He begins by stating that Hollywood makes "unbelievable, unremarkable shit." He argues that bad acting, weak directing, and moronic writing are easy targets. Instead, he laments a lack of realism in modern American cinema. He makes an analogy to Dog Day Afternoon, a great movie well-loved by critics, but points out that even that iconic movie did not push the envelope enough.
Oakenfold wonders what would happen if Dog Day Afternoon had depicted Al Pacino's bank robber character, Sonny, killing hostages right away. He posits that instead of only a few hostages dying, what if tens or hundreds of hostages were killed in modern media- something that never happened in the 1970s when the movie was made. He concludes by demonstrating his frustration at Hollywood's lack of imagination, which keeps it "within the realm of conventional cinema."
This song's lyrics suggest the significant problem of Hollywood's lack of realism, which can prevent directors from creating truly innovative and imaginative movies. The lyrics show that sometimes it is important to push the envelope and challenge norms to create truly great works of cinematic art.
Line by Line Meaning
You know what the problem with Hollywood is?
The singer is about to express their opinion on a problem they have with the Hollywood movie industry.
They make shit.
The singer thinks that the movies produced by Hollywood are of poor quality.
Unbelievable, unremarkable sshit.
The singer emphasises that Hollywood movies are so bad that it defies belief.
Now I'm not some grungy wannabe filmmaker
The artist points out that they are not an inexperienced or amateur filmmaker.
That's searching for existentialism
The artist is not trying to create movies that explore deep philosophical ideas.
Through a haze of bong smoke or something.
The singer is not using drugs to inspire their creativity.
No, it's easy to pick apart bad acting, short-sighted directing,
The singer is saying that it is straightforward to find problems with aspects of movies such as the acting and directing.
And a purely moronic stringing together of words that many of the studios term as "prose".
The artist believes that the writing in movies is often very unintelligent and nonsensical.
No, I'm talking about the lack of realism.
The artist is arguing that movies often lack realistic elements.
Realism; not a pervasive element in today's modern American cinematic vision.
The artist is pointing out that realism is not a dominant feature in many modern American movies.
Take Dog Day Afternoon, for example.
The singer is using the movie Dog Day Afternoon to illustrate their point about realism.
Arguably Pacino's best work, short of Scarface and Godfather, of course.
The artist acknowledges that Al Pacino is a great actor and has appeared in many classic films.
Masterpiece of directing, easily Lumet's best.
The singer considers the directing in Dog Day Afternoon to be exceptional.
The cinematography, the acting, the screenplay, all top-notch.
The singer believes that each aspect of the movie is of excellent quality.
But... they didn't push the envelope.
The singer thinks that the movie did not go far enough in pushing boundaries or trying new things.
Now what if in Dog Day, Sonny REALLY wanted to get away with it?
The artist is imagining a different version of the movie with a more ruthless and determined main character.
What if - now here's the tricky part - what if he started killing hostages right away?
The artist is considering a scenario where the main character starts murdering hostages from the outset of the movie.
No mercy, no quarter.
The singer is imagining a lack of compassion or forgiveness displayed by the main character.
"Meet our demands or the pretty blonde in the bellbottoms gets it the back of the head." Bam, splat!
The singer is creating a violent scenario where a hostage is executed.
What, still no bus?
The artist is implying that the violence occurring in the movie has not yet forced a response from law enforcement.
Come on! How many innocent victims splattered across a window would it take to have the city reverse its policy on hostage situations?
The artist is questioning why the authorities have not done more to deal with the situation shown in the movie.
And this is 1976; there's no CNN, there's no CNBC, there's no internet!
The artist is reminding the listener that this movie was set in a time when communication and information sharing were not as widespread as they are today.
Now fast forward to today, present time, same situation.
The singer is proposing the scenario from Dog Day Afternoon be moved to the present day.
How quickly would the modern media make a frenzy over this?
The artist is asking how fast the news media would report on a real-life event that resembled the scenario from Dog Day Afternoon.
In a matter of hours, it'd be the biggest story from Boston to Budapest!
The singer believes that the story from the movie would be a major news event if it happened in real life.
Ten hostages die, twenty, thirty; bam bam, one after another.
The singer is imagining a situation where lots of hostages die quickly and violently.
All caught in high-def, computer-enhanced, color corrected.
The singer is describing how contemporary technology would allow for any such event to be captured in high-quality video or images.
You can practically taste the brain matter.
The artist is creating an extremely graphic and unpleasant image of the aftermath of the violence.
All for what? A bus, a plane?
The artist is questioning the justification for the violent actions taken by the characters in the movie and how such actions would be received by the public in real life.
A couple of million dollars that's federally insured?
The singer is highlighting the fact that the central motivation for the violent actions shown in the movie is actually insured by the government and therefore easily recoverable.
I don't think so. Just a thought.
The singer is offering their opinion that such violence would not be justified in real life.
I mean, it's not within the realm of conventional cinema... but what if?
The artist is acknowledging that their idea is not something most people would consider conventional cinema but is asking the listener to imagine the scenario regardless.
Writer(s): Paul Oakenfold, Mike A. Maddox
Contributed by Dominic R. Suggest a correction in the comments below.
@johnmadden9613
00:00 Unknown Artist Swordfish (Intro)
02:44 Dope Smugglaz The Word (PMT Remix)
07:15 Jan Johnston Unafraid (Paul Oakenfold Mix)
12:35 Paul Oakenfold & Christopher Young Dark Machine
20:10 Muse New Born (Paul Oakenfold Mix)
25:52 Paul Oakenfold & Christopher Young Chase
32:08 Unknown Artist Harry Houdini
32:39 Lemon Jelly Kneel Before Your God
34:41 N*E*R*D Feat. Lee Harvey & Vita (3) Lapdance (Paul Oakenfold Swordfish Mix)
38:20 Paul Oakenfold Speed
42:11 Paul Oakenfold vs. Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force* Planet Rock (Swordfish Mix)
49:58 Paul Oakenfold Stanley's Theme
54:43 Paul Oakenfold Password
58:52 Patient Saints On Your Mind (Omaha Mix)
01:06:08 Paul Oakenfold & Amoebassassin* Get Out Of My Life Now
@Xclub40X
Whoever is hacking in 2019 and onwards. . . My love to you.
Reverse engineers
Hardware hackers
Software hackers
Bug hunters
Pen testers
Sys admins
we are family . Let's keep doing this thing, love you all
@afrizal1227
I’m 41 years old from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Still have the OST CD of this masterpiece by Paul Oakenfold. One of the earliest influencer in Electronic music during my time growing up along with Armin Van Buuren, Paul Van Dyk, Ferry Corsten, Carl Cox, Sasha, Seb Fontaine etc.
@peanpeanleeramas1016
I'm 41 from Thailand
@SlyPsycho
The only one i know from the ones you mentioned is Armin Van Buren.. Don't know the other 5.. Got any song recommendations from them?
@BoltRM
FWIW: Be sure to check out: Tangerine Dream! I liked their 1st 20 albums or so the best ;)
Blade Runner by Vangelis is one of my fav albums.
Also check out Klaus Schulze who recently passed :( , Ulrich Schnauss, Jean-Michel Jarre
@joeshmo9719
Word
@GoldKingsMan
42 UK here great movie and soundtrack!
@graphixch
When 2001 sounded more “cyber” and futuristic then 2021. This album takes me back.
@_..____
Well said
@thomasantz6661
Mr. Unafraid to you, buster!
@Widderic
A fucking men to that! 2001 was something different! I'm convinced we opened up some sort of time rift that sent us on some lame trajectory. It just isn't the same!