Pete Gooding

Pete Gooding DJ, producer and international radio presenter Pete Gooding is fully part of Ibiza’s balearic fabric.

Resident DJ at the world-famous Café Mambo since 1996, Gooding has played thousands of sunset sets, marking the end of one sun-drenched Ibizan day with perfectly-pitched ambient, classical and film scores before kick-starting another hedonistic night with the best music on the planet.

He has just finished making the 20th anniversary Café Mambo compilation, which will be released this summer as part of a new relationship with Universal Records. It’s the tenth edition he’s steered into music lovers’ record collections and includes music from The Rolling Stones, London Grammar, Lulu Rouge and Tensnake. Fat Boy Slim and Pete Tong made exclusive new tunes for the album and Gooding remixed Level 42’s balearic classic ‘The Sun Goes Down (Livin’ It Up)’.

It’s a versatility and confidence that’s made him in demand worldwide. To date he has performed in over 80 countries, attracting residencies at Bestival, and at the 80,000 capacity Stella Polaris festival in Denmark.
Over two decades DJing, Gooding put together ten volumes of the popular Café Mambo compilations and appeared on hundreds as an artist. His remix catalogue spans the biggest names (Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake) to the trenchantly underground – he recently re-edited Fini Tribe’s post-punk classic De Testimony. He’s released over 150 records and was named Best Ibiza DJ at the Ibiza DJ Awards in 2002.
His track ‘Runnin’ as Doman & Gooding was Number One on Beatport and was nominated for a Canadian Juno Award. He has released tracks on major labels including Universal, Sony, Virgin and EMI as well as the best independents including Defected, Hooj Choons, Junior Boy’s Own offshoot Fuju, Paper Recordings, Toolroom and many others.

“As a kid I was really academic. My older sister gave me the House Sound of Chicago Volume 1 and I got so obsessed I failed everything. I missed my Business Studies GCSE because it was the day my local record shop was getting Frankie Knuckles’ ‘Your Love’ on Trax. They were only getting three copies. I met Frankie Knuckles years later and told him. He signed my copy: ‘Dear Pete, you made the right choice.’” Fast forward to 2011 and another big box was ticked when Gooding officially remixed ‘Your Love’.
House music was exploding in Britain in the 1990s but Gooding had a head start. Family holidays to Ibiza in the late ‘80s and a hedonistic big sister meant he’d been smuggled in to see Alfredo play at legendary club Amnesia aged 15. He returned whenever he could, soaking up the sounds of Jose Padilla at the Café Del Mar. In the mid-‘90s found himself resident at the neighbouring Café Mambo, fusing everything he’d learned from Padilla with his own musical obsessions over nine hour sets, seven nights a week.

He had a very strong passion for music growing up. He and a group of friends started running illegal raves in motorway tunnels in Warwickshire and around Birmingham. Shortly after this, Gooding and Phil Dockerty (later of Futureshock) started What You Like. They booked the biggest names in house at the time including DJs Tony Humphries, Graeme Park and Erick Morillo and it ran every Tuesday for seven years. Later, Pete became resident at one of the most famous of the ‘90s superclubs, Renaissance. In turn this led to big room residencies across the world, including Ibiza’s biggest clubs Pacha, Amnesia and Privilege.

Gooding and Phil Dockerty are also having great success with their blog, Secret Life Music, which features articles from luminaries like Greg Wilson. “We did it as a hobby and didn’t think anyone was looking. We looked at the stats after nine months and we’d had 800,000 hits.”

The blog soon became a label and over the last year has released music from rising Danish star August Jakobsen, Bambook, Robot84 as well as his own releases. The label has just signed a new track from the Godfather Of Chill-Out Jose Padilla which will be released summer 2014.

Gooding is consistently busy making music with long-time friend Steve Miller (Afterlife). They work together under the name No Logo and they are currently following up 2012’s self-titled album released on Chris Coco’s Melodica Label.

If that wasn’t enough, he has devoted eight years to his much-loved weekly radio show, The Global Network. The show started on Ministry Radio and is now syndicated to over 200 stations worldwide with a listenership in seven figures each week.

The DJ sets, compilations, blogs and radio shows are all tied together by a passion for one thing: Gooding’s love of finding, playing and making music.

“I don’t play records because they’re cool. I play what I get excited about.”