Paul Oakenfold Connects With His Audience

Paul Oakenfold has received more mainstream pop attention than any other DJ, so now he’s ripe for a backlash. There are those who claim the Englishman is the beneficiary of a lot of hype, that his greatest talent is self-promotion and that he reached the U.S. at just the right time.

Those arguments may have some validity, but the point those detractors miss is that no DJ today can work a crowd into a frenzy like Oakenfold. He proved it at the Coachella Festival in Indio in April, and he reaffirmed it with Monday’s two-hour set at the Mayan Theatre.

In town on the eve of the release of “Bunkka,” his first album of original material, Oakenfold got off to a slow start despite the enthusiastic crowd, which greeted him with chants of “Oakie” when the curtain rose. For the first half of the show he often left long pauses between songs, something uncharacteristic for a dance music event. While the audience, which treated the night more like a rock concert than a DJ set anyway, used those gaps to applaud, they would have exploded had he followed through on any of the room-filling synthesizer trance hooks that he teased them with.

Whether it took Oakenfold a while to warm up or he was just saving up for the big finish, the closing was well worth the wait. Beginning with a remix of the Dirty Vegas techno hit “Days Go By,” Oakenfold wove a finale that included deep and expansive trance melodies leading into U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the song he spun last New Year’s Eve at midnight on Hollywood Boulevard.

If “Where the Streets Have No Name” is a bit of an obvious song, it doesn’t change the fact that at such moments Oakenfold made a genuine connection with his audience.

Having studied at the school of arena rock (he’s opened for U2 overseas), Oakenfold is an unparalleled showman on the dance circuit. And that’s probably the best explanation of all for the success he’s achieved.