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thumb|325px|right|Paul Oakenfold performs at Club Nation in Washington DC.
Photo by: Utopium
'''Paul Oakenfold''' (born August 30, 1963 in London, England) is a record producer and one of the best-known DJs worldwide.
In 1987, Oakenfold and his friends, Trevor Fung and Ian St. Paul, spent several months in Ibiza, Spain, where they fell in love with the dance club music (see 1987 in music). Using influences from Ibiza's sound, Italo disco, soul and house, Oakenfold produced Happy Mondays' ''Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches'', followed by productions of remixes for U2, Massive Attack, Arrested Development, The Cure, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Simply Red, New Order, The Doors, and The Shamen with production partner Steve Osborne under the collaborative name '''Perfecto'''. Many of these remixes were released under his label Perfecto Records.
In addition to producing records, Oakenfold also mixes them. He first started playing in clubs as a teenager and soon built up a reputation as a top party DJ. However, it wasn't until the early 1990s when the name Paul Oakenfold was associated with the DJ elite. The reason for this rise in public admiration was his adoption of a new breed of dance music called Trance, something he discovered on the hippy beaches of Goa in India and fused with similar sounding European records to create his own distinct sound. He took this to the mainstream when in 1994 he created a two hour set for BBC Radio One's Essential Mix. This set became known as the Goa Mix and to this day is the most requested broadcast on the BBC radio network.
In 1996 Oakenfold mixed one disc of the double album Fantazia House Collection 6, a UK House music compilation series that had been massively successful at the time. He brought his distinctive style to the mix.
After a short spell as a member of the band Grace, Oakenfold became Cream's resident DJ from 1997 to 1999. During this time, he began to concentrate on building an American audience, which led to the US release of ''Tranceport'' in 1998. The album was well-received by American trance music fans, and even garnered him modest acceptance in the mainstream American music scene. Oakenfold followed Tranceport with arguably his most successful album ''Perfecto Presents Another World'' which introduced millions to his mixing skills. His popularity across the Atlantic is slowly growing thanks to his work on the film soundtracks of ''Swordfish'', ''The Matrix Reloaded'', ''Collateral'', ''Die Another Day'', for which he remixed The James Bond Theme. He later worked on the James Bond video game, ''GoldenEye: Rogue Agent'' and contributed to the soundtrack of the
