Las Vegas Weekly

August 29, 2008 · 2 PM

Vegas gets its first resident superstar DJ in Paul Oakenfold

By Robin Leach

Paul Oakenfold

Photo: Palms

George Maloof’s entertainment team at the Palms is betting big on one of the world’s biggest DJ names in dance music. They’ve hired famed Paul Oakenfold to be the city’s first resident superstar DJ for the newly redesigned 25,000-square-foot Rain nightlife venue. Last weekend, Paul was back in his British home country as the opening act for Madonna’s world tour premiere and this Saturday he’ll kick off his long-term run at Rain. But Paul is far more than a man who spins records and warms up Madonna’s fans with a one-hour set in her stadium shows throughout Europe.

He is the producer who composed film score soundtracks for CBS's Big Brother, The Bourne Supremacy and The Matrix Reloaded. Paul, a London-born Cockney, has to complete his Madonna gigs in Europe until she starts her North American gigs, when he’ll leave to be every weekend at Rain. When he’s away, he’ll bring in his own team of DJs from his Perfecto label, including Seb Fontaine and Hernan Cattaneo -- the high-end quality folks from the European clubs in St. Tropez and Ibiza.

"There’s nowhere in America other than Vegas that I would want to be a resident DJ,” he said. “It’s the world’s oyster and our Perfecto nights at Rain will take clubbing to a whole new level. It will be the most extravagant nightlife experience the United States has ever seen. After 10 years of traveling the world I’ve finally found a home. I was offered another Vegas residency but I turned it down. It didn’t feel right and the Palms is always ready for change and is very forward thinking. I feel getting involved with the Maloofs is a good partnership.”

One of the reasons for his alliance with the Palms is its state of the art Fantasy Tower recording studios, where he will work from with new album projects for Tommy Lee, Dave Navarro and Snoop Dogg. As he made plans for the move to Vegas, I talked with him earlier this week. Here’s the transcript of our conversation:

Robin Leach: What is your view of Vegas and the club scene here that has literally exploded for DJs.

Paul Oakenfold: I think in terms of Vegas, it is an international destination. I have just come back from Europe in the last month and I have been explaining to various people what I’m up to. A lot of people are excited to travel to Vegas. It is an international destination. In terms of nightclubs, they are all tending to do something similar so what we are intending to do -- bring more European music, an approach and promotion very much what they do in Ibiza, which is world-renown in terms of clubbing. What we are doing is different. It is very important to me to get the support of the locals because that is how you build a nightclub.

RL: Why have DJs become such superstars?

PO: I think over the years in the U.K. anyway, people would go into nightclubs just to dance and not take too much notice of the DJ, then this trend appeared where a DJ would get a kind of following because he was playing the kind of music people wanted to hear and they couldn’t hear it anywhere else, because they were playing Top 40. It became popular to follow the DJ and from there they started making their own records, making other bands, remixing artists and the culture in England when it comes to DJs is youth culture -- massive.

RL: Is a DJ today more than what it was years ago?

PO: Absolutely. An all-around DJ must know his way around a recoding studio, must be able to produce his songs. Times have changed from where the traditional DJ was just playing other people’s music.

RL: Is this a leap of faith by both you and the Palms in that it is the first residency of Vegas?

PO: In some respects. I was offered a couple other residencies in Vegas prior to agreeing on the Palms. I think the Palms is perfect for what I want to do. I think it is a young hotel and I now think the time is right and that is why I decided to do it.

RL: Up until 2002 we had nightclubs, but they weren’t what we have now. Can it keep going? Is there a life cycle?

PO: It is usually reinventing itself. As you know, Vegas has changed, as before it was a destination for families and now it is an adult playground, so there is always room for new clubs. They will come and go and change, reinventing themselves within the same shell. Clubs always have a cycle of three to five years, then they need new paint, a new name and a new campaign to keep on going. That is generally the cycle for a nightclub.

RL: Some of the old very early-days nightclubs, there were fewer of them and they lasted longer. Is that an accurate observation?

PO: Yes, you are right. The fewer nightclubs that lasted longer became legends in their own right. Now it is much more of a disposable business. People pour million of dollars into it and some of them fail right from the beginning. I have seen that not just in England, but in the States also.

RL: Do you DJ around the world.

PO: I do. I am actually still on this tour with Madonna and it kind of overlaps with my residency, and I will be missing a few shows in Vegas because of the tour, but it helps me because when I do sit there and do media at the level I have been doing it, I can talk about Vegas and where I am and where I am planning to go in terms of music with Vegas. I even have an opera singer coming down to Rain and we are going to do two songs together. So we are trying to do different, unique, unexpected things and by still picking up these Madonna dates and with the press, all roads will lead to Vegas -- that is the plan. Her premiere show was simply great. It's my job for an hour before she comes on stage to warm the crowd up. I do a completely different set from what I do in Vegas, and actually on the American tour. I will only be on the stadium gigs. My point is I am playing to a bigger audience, so I have to play a lot more commercial. There is no point in playing the latest underground tracks when you are warming up for an artist on that level.

RL: Is Madonna the first artist to have a DJ open for her?

PO: I toured with U2 first and then Madonna, so it is not the obvious thing for those artists to do, but it is something I felt I could do and I approach it in a different way then if I was deejaying in a nightclub.

RL: Do I get the feeling that you spend more time on airplanes crossing the Atlantic than you do in nightclubs?

PO: I do, but now that I am opening in Vegas I won’t be doing as much traveling.

RL: Is it a bigger challenge to play in a Rain nightclub than there is to play for a stadium filled with 40,000 or 100,000 people?

PO: It is different in terms of music. You can get really different in front of a smaller crowd. There is not as much pressure to play big tunes that people want to hear. You can be a lot more cutting edge and creative in front of a smaller crowd. I think it is important to entertain and educate in terms of being a DJ. Bands in the old days provided music in 20-minute intervals: 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off. I play 3 hours, and then I take a break. You are mentally drained but the longest set I once did was six hours straight through.

RL: Where did your love of music come from?

PO: My father. He is a musician in a skiffle band -- Lonnie Donagan there you go -- and back in those days I learned to play the piano and guitar. I was in a band that was terrible. My mom said to me when I was 16, 'what do you want to do?' I said I want to be in a band, and she said 'no way are you going to do that,' so I went off and studied to become a recording engineer, but wound up becoming this DJ and starting a phenomenon.

Paul Oakenfold debuts this Saturday at Rain in the Palms.

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