Paul Oakenfold by Richard Norris

Author:Richard Norris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409082149
Publisher: Transworld

11

Cream: Resident

‘We’d spend Monday and Tuesday recovering, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday looking forward to Saturday. We’d live for the weekend. Every Saturday we’d travel to Liverpool to get our Oakenfold fix. It was like an addiction.’

Michelle Monaghan, Cream regular

‘For four, maybe five years Cream was undoubtedly the place to be. I didn’t feel like I had to be in London at any particular club. Come Saturday, it was all about Liverpool.’

Ben Turner, former editor, Muzik magazine, 2006

IF YOU WANT to know what’s happening in Liverpool right now, try this. Stand on the main road next to the docklands, away from Birkenhead, away from the river Mersey, away from the massive new sports complex that’s sprouting up near the Albert Dock. Face inland. Look towards the city centre; you’ll see an unusual site. The sky is filled with cranes, dozens of them. It’s a visible, towering sign of Liverpool’s recent optimism. The city is undergoing a facelift that would have been unthinkable, laughable even, when I lived there in the cash-strapped mid-eighties. There may be local doubt whether there’s enough money or people around to fill these new pads, and the pace and scale of development even led to a recent UNESCO fact-finding mission, questioning the city’s recently anointed world heritage status, but there’s no doubt that Liverpool is moving up a gear for its year as European City of Culture. The downtown arcades near where the legendary old Probe record shop stood are now a gleaming new Cavern shopping quarter, which is a bit ironic for a city that bulldozed the original Cavern Club site in the early seventies to make way for a car park. Everywhere you turn seems to be the site of some new retail development. In the top part of the town centre, in the area near Chinatown, there’s a string of new bars and clubs, where once the only entertainment was an irregular lock-in run by a gregarious Chinese landlord named Ernie Wu. If we’re talking bar, music and club culture, then the European City of Culture tag is spot-on.

In Wolstenholme Square, near Duke Street, slap bang in the middle of this new after-dark economy, sits an imposing warehouselike space. Once a club known as the Academy, then later Nation, it is more commonly known as the building that housed the biggest, most successful UK club of the nineties. The club was so influential, it’s no coincidence that its success mirrored the fortunes of the rapidly evolving city that’s grown up around it. The club is called Cream. And there was no more successful DJ ever to play at Cream than Paul Oakenfold. Paul’s two-year residency in the Annexe and Courtyard is the stuff of clubland legend, right up there with Larry Levan at Paradise Garage or Junior Vasquez at Sound Factory. The formative years at Future and Spectrum were groundbreaking, iconic, fresh, but it was in Liverpool, at Cream, that the DJ made his most indelible mark.

The seeds for Paul’s two-year late-nineties residency were sown in the summer of 1988.

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