Song and dance man

You should try it when you’re doing the hoovering or the washing up, that’s who I made it for. The clubbers can buy the singles!”

Paul Oakenfold’s not kidding. Bunkka is his first album as an artist and tunesmith as distinct from DJ, remixer, soundtrack scorer, A&R man or any of the other hats he’s worn over the last 20 years. And while the record will hardly cause rioting in the clubs or even earn him the epithet of dance Judas, it does bring forth elements that have lain dormant in his sound for the last 15 years – breakbeats, guitar riffs, hooks; all the rings and bells of traditional song structure. Whatever that is.

In short, the man who taught so many rock bands how to dance is now learning how to sing – metaphorically speaking. Oakenfold by his own admission is no Maria Callas, so Bunkka is the work of a ventriloquist with an extensive cast of dummies to play around with.

Alongside fresh talent like Carla Warner, Tiff Lacey and Emiliana Torrinni, the album features revolving door walk-ons from So Solid Crew’s Asher D, Perry Farrell, Ice Cube, Grant Lee Phillips, Crazy Town’s Shifty Shellshock, Nelly Furtado, Tricky and Hunter S. Thompson.

He’s sitting in his tiny Perfecto office in Fulham, South West London, a small ball of energy rooting through boxes of CDs, shifting in his seat, still acclimatising to an unfamiliar interview process.

So why has he decided to step out from behind the desk now, 17 years after that first Eureka in Ibiza town?

“Because I feel comfortable at this time in my career to take on a challenge,” he declares. “I know I could make a DJ record for the club that is instrumental-based with a few samples, but I wanted to do something that stimulated me ’cos I’d been doing compilation albums and remixes and producing and I wasn’t getting nothing from it personally. I wanted to make a song-based album that had a cutting edge sound and represented my experience in dance, from when I signed rap bands to when I toured with rock bands, to the breakbeat and guitars element to the filmic aspect of ‘Zoo York’.

“So I set off on this journey and didn’t tell anyone I was doing it ’cos I really didn’t want the pressure. I financed it myself, there was a tiny little studio called The Bunkka, hence the title, and I let the record develop over its own time, stopped it for six months, went to LA, did a soundtrack, then jumped back into it. That was probably the best move ever ’cos it gave time to let the record breathe and let me think it through.”

But as Oakenfold explains, this break from the Bunkka mentality wasn’t exactly a holiday. Scoring films like Dominic Sena’s Swordfish (produced by Joel Silver) and contributing to Tim Burton’s Planet Of The Apes meant switching headspace from private dreams to public responsibilities.

To make things even more difficult, the score is almost as low on the list of Hollywood priorities as the script.

“They usually go over budget on the film,” he says, “and in Hollywood they don’t realise how important the music can be. Michael Mann does. Ridley Scott does. They’re directly involved in their sound. But basically you’re up against it. Suddenly they say, ‘We want this now!’ and you have to deliver it. But (a) I’ve always been under pressure so it doesn’t bother me, and (b) I felt that the understanding I had with the director and the producer was maybe a little bit different than a normal composer, because I come from a different world, so they kind of want your involvement ’cos they know you can open the doors to a youth market.”

So, Oakenfold’s signature effects – great panoramic whooshes of jet-engine keyboards that automatically conjure images of whacked-out yoots baggy-dancing on beaches with arms extended – now inspire dollar signs. But with commercial endeavours like the Big Brother theme, does he think there’s a danger of devaluing his own pet sounds through overexposure?

“Okay, Big Brother, that went on to be a single and went in at number 4 in the pop charts . . . I think the reason why you’re making the music for film or television is to get it out there to as many people as possible. And doing film or TV you have to focus on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”

Paul Oakenfold has attended a few parties in his time. In fact, he’s been a regular techno Zelig, present at some of the brightest flashpoints in dance culture since the first wave of hip-hop. Coming to prominence in the mid-’80s as a DJ, A&R man (he signed Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince and Salt ‘N’ Pepa to London’s Champion Records), promoter and Def Jam agent, he experienced his rave epiphany in Ibiza clubs like Amnesia, Pasha and Ku in 1985. Upon returning to South London, he attempted to replicate the Balearic scene with a club called The Funhouse, but it was too soon. The twin E factors (Ecstasy and eclecticism – everything from early house to indie to ‘The Whole Of The Moon’) wouldn’t catch on until two years later, by which point word had filtered back via the trade routes trodden by hundreds of British season trippers. In 1987 Oakenfold persuaded a London club owner to let him run after-hours events, and by the time the city’s scenesters and tastemakers got wise to this nocturnal happening, an entire movement had been spawned, with all the trappings of gay club subculture being appropriated by suburban straights. By early ’88 Oakenfold could just about fill the 2000 capacity Heaven on a Monday night. The scene expanded, and raves started to take on the air of some weird hedonistic religious ceremony, with E replacing peyote/yage/holy communion as the sacramental drug of choice, opening a wormhole to heaven.

Then it went overground. By the second summer of love in 1988, the Acid House scene was no longer an elitist thang. E replaced alcohol as the drug of choice for soccer hooligans, resulting in the unlikely social phenomenon of what Simon Reynolds called “love thugs”. Soon tabloids like The Sun and The Mirror seized on a number of Ecstasy-related deaths as the opportunity to run a series of Killer Drug stories and sex-orgy exposés (in fact, E tends to reduce the libido, not aggravate it).

Oakenfold’s reaction to this “Acid Ted” syndrome was to chill out. He launched his 98bpm movement, keeping the tempo down, playing tracks from On U Sound and Massive Attack while simultaneously gravitating towards the weird mish-mash of post-punk-funk and acid house coming out of Manchester bands like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, whose Madchester Rave On EP and Pills And Thrills And Bellyaches album he produced with Steve Osborne.

Back in the Perfecto office, Oakenfold delivers his verdict on 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s film about the Factory Records/Manchester scene.

“I thought it was terrible,” he says. “The title’s misleading because it’s a film about Tony Wilson. I thought the way it was shot, the graphics, it was difficult to follow, very self-indulgent. The film won’t travel well; it won’t work outside the UK. There was a lot more that went on in that area.”

Post Madchester, Oakenfold launched his Perfecto label and played a significant role in U2’s early ’90s makeover with a slew of near-symphonic dance mixes of tracks like ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing, ‘Lemon’, ‘Mysterious Ways’, ‘Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car’ and ‘Numb’. U2 returned the favour by hiring him as DJ on the Zoo TV tour.

Since then, he’s toured the planet, acting as a liaison of sorts between BBC Radio 1 and the dance underworld, as well as overseeing Perfecto – whose catalogue includes his own mix compilations plus albums by Arthur Baker and Timo Maas – and undertaking film projects and a string of high profile resprays (including Madonna’s ‘What It feels Like For A Girl’).

And now Bunkka, his rebirth as a song and dance man. Curiously enough, the shortest piece on the album, ‘Nixon’s Spirit’, suggests the most new possibilities for Oakenfold, not least in the realm of spoken word-meets-beats. Featuring snatches of dialogue by Hunter S. Thompson culled from six hours of conversation, this track underlines connections between gonzo journalism and dance culture, sparked when Oakenfold began to see Hunter S. quotes appearing on club fliers.

“Basically we had communication on the phone for a period of time,” he explains. “I’d be coming out of nightclubs and ringing him up with the time difference in Denver, saying, ‘I’ve got this idea’. So we talked it through for about five months, I was sending him records, so when I did go and meet him, he knew exactly what I wanted.”

So how did they meet?

“I was on my way to Denver, touring America, and he rang me up and said, ‘Listen, meet me in LA’. I was fucking nervous because it was Hunter S. Thompson and I’d heard all these stories. And you have to meet him at midnight at his hotel suite because he works all night and sleeps all day. So I’m kind of preparing, and then I get this call at ten o’ clock (saying) he’s in the bar of the hotel hanging out with friends. And without namedropping, when they told tell me who his friends were, I was thinking, ‘Fucking hell man, I’m even more nervous now’. So I went down to the hotel, met him at the bar.”

Exactly what kind of friends are we talking about?

“Eh . . . Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson. So I pulled his assistant Anita to the side and said, ‘Listen, what’s gonna go on here? Am I actually going to get anything done?’ So she says, ‘Let’s just hang out.’ It was quite funny ’cos twenty minutes in Sean Penn suddenly turns around and says, ‘Well who are you, what are you doing here?’ In those situations you listen, you don’t talk. And it’s fascinating listening anyway ’cos you’re quite in awe of the situation.

“But the point is, we go upstairs with Hunter. I knew I needed to get dialogue out of him so that I could put music around it to make musical sense. So, very similar to what we’re doing here, we sat and I recorded him, we drank, we partied for five or six hours. During the course of the evening various characters kept coming up to his hotel room, all through the night, and it was becoming very, very difficult to focus. You’d get into a conversation and ask him about his childhood, and why he worked all night, and what he wanted to achieve, and why does he feel that his books are relevant, but I wasn’t getting what I needed to make the record because of the amount of people coming in the room, so I left really disappointed actually. And I rang him up the next day and said, ‘I really need to get you alone, can you just give me two hours?’ And now that I’d broken down the barriers I knew what I wanted, so I went back the next night and managed to get something that people around the world could relate to.”

That something was a drawled indictment of Thompson’s long-time nemesis, Richard Nixon. Here’s a portion of what Oakenfold recorded:

“Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives, whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards . . . This is not a generational thing – you don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly Nazi spirit. He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nest. And that was a crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, and by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Nixon broke the heart of the American dream.”

Oakenfold: “The dream that everyone has, it’s based around an American dream. And my conversation that led him to that point was (about) how globally government and society tell you can’t do this or that. The younger you are the bigger the dreams you have. The older you get the more you realise you can’t fulfil your dreams because society and government are holding you down.

“But what I’m saying is you can fulfil your dreams, because I’ve done it, and many, many other people have done it. Considering I’m not a singer, I never ever thought I could make this record, and I’ve finally made it, and it’s probably the biggest and most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Oakenfold on…

Tricky and Nelly Furtado

“I was very lucky in that I recorded Nelly Furtado a year and a half ago. Tricky wasn’t on it, it was me and Nelly. Then Nelly became this big star, and I couldn’t get her to finish the record. I was a verse short, and I was like, ‘I can’t sing, who am I gonna get?’ Then my manager said, ‘Listen, ‘Tricky’s in town’. So it was cool, we hung out and I said, ‘I want you just to complement her and bring out her vocal’ and he did. I was looking for the contrast of the dark and the light.”

Perry Farrell

“Perry’s a forward thinker, he recreated himself as a DJ playing drum ‘n’ bass – where did that come from? A maverick rock singer, as a performer one of the best, but a very shy individual character who’s normally quite reserved, and then suddenly a drum ‘n’ bass DJ. You go to his house and it’s like going to Thailand, very calm and very Balinese. It’s going to be very interesting to see what the new Jane’s Addiction album is going to be like.”

U2 Remixes

“I think you find that the bigger the artist the cooler they are. They just gave (the masters) to me and let me get on with it. You get feedback, like I mixed ‘Beautiful Day’ for America and spoke to Bono and he said, ‘I want some more backing vocals in it’ and I was like, ‘Fine, of course, whatever you want, it goes without saying – you want belly dancing in the background? No problem!’ But what’s so fucking cool about them is they let you get on with your craft. Same thing with Madonna: ‘Just go and do what you do – I’m not gonna try and tell you’.”