Paul Oakenfold was around music long before acid house gave Britain a new uniform and somewhere to disappear for the weekend. His early years were tied to soul, funk, hip-hop and the London club world, and a spell in New York put him close to the hip-hop scene while it was still exploding. Back in Britain he worked around labels and artists as well as DJing. So when house music arrived, he already understood both sides of the business: what moved a dancefloor and how records got from an artist into people’s hands.

Then came Ibiza in 1987. Oakenfold went out there for his birthday with Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker, and the trip has become one of those stories that gets told whenever people talk about the start of acid house in Britain. The important point is not that four DJs somehow invented rave on holiday — they did not. It is that they experienced Alfredo Fiorito at Amnesia playing the Balearic way: house mixed with pop, rock, indie and whatever else worked, with ecstasy changing the atmosphere on the floor. They came home wanting to build nights that felt like that.

Oakenfold’s first big move was the Project Club, then Future at the tiny back room of Heaven. Future was invite-only, sweaty and small enough for the new crowd to recognise each other. The music wasn’t yet boxed into the rules that came later. Acid house, Chicago records, European stuff and the Balearic records they’d brought back could all work together. The emphasis was on recreating the open musical approach and atmosphere they had encountered in Ibiza.

By 1988 it had outgrown the little room. Spectrum opened on Monday nights at Heaven and became one of the clubs most closely associated with acid house’s rapid expansion in London. Fluorescent clothes, smiley faces, strobes, smoke, sweat and a crowd losing it to music most of Britain still didn’t understand. A Monday night pulling those sorts of numbers told you something massive was happening. Future and Spectrum put Oakenfold right in the middle of the London end of the acid-house explosion while warehouse parties and the M25 scene were blowing up around it.

He wasn’t only standing behind the decks. With Steve Osborne he became heavily involved in remixing and production, and one of the biggest jobs was Happy Mondays. Their work around Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches helped smash together indie, club music and the whole Madchester moment. It was another sign of how far dance culture was spreading: the sounds and production ideas from clubs were no longer staying underground after Sunday morning.

Perfecto followed at the beginning of the 90s and became the name most people would eventually connect with Oakenfold. As rave splintered into different sounds, his sets moved towards progressive house and trance without losing that old habit of building a journey rather than hammering one style from start to finish. Perfecto released and supported records that fitted that world and gave Oakenfold a label identity that could travel with him as his bookings got bigger.

One of the strangest and best examples of how he thought about a set came from Goa. After playing in India, he came back with the psychedelic trance sound rattling around his head and built the two-hour Goa Mix for BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix on 18 December 1994. It wasn’t just two hours of banging trance. It moved through Goa and progressive records, ambient sections, film music and unexpected moments including Goldie’s “Inner City Life”. It sounded like somebody telling a story with records, and ravers were still swapping copies of it years later.

Then came Cream. Oakenfold’s residency at the Liverpool club in the late 90s put him in front of one of Britain’s biggest weekly dance crowds at exactly the point trance was becoming enormous. The superclub years sometimes get treated like a completely separate world from rave, but loads of the people filling those clubs had come through the same culture. Bigger venues, slicker production and international bookings didn’t erase what had happened in 1988 — they were part of what it grew into.

By the end of the 90s Oakenfold was taking that sound into places DJs simply hadn’t occupied a decade earlier. He supported U2 on their PopMart tour, played huge international shows and became one of the names associated with the rise of the “superstar DJ”. America became a major part of his career, followed by film work, production and more Perfecto releases. Dance music had moved from warehouses and Monday nights at Heaven to arenas, Hollywood and world tours in barely more than a decade.

That’s why Paul Oakenfold belongs here. The line running through the career is clear: Ibiza, Future, Spectrum, acid house, the Mondays, Perfecto, the Goa Mix, Cream and then the global years. He didn’t create all of those movements on his own — nobody did — but he was standing in some very important DJ booths while British dance culture went from a small gang of people chasing a new feeling to something the whole world knew about.