Pete Gooding

Known primarily for his decade-long residency at Café Mambo in Ibiza, Pete Gooding is a British-born DJ/producer with a large selection of mix albums to his credit, along with a deep catalog of productions, most of them collaborations. Born in Birmingham, England, Gooding was turned on to electronic dance music at a young age. At age 12, his sister gave him a cassette of the seminal compilation The House Sound of Chicago (1986), and then at age 15, he visited Ibiza for the first time — two key experiences that left lasting impressions upon him. In 1992 Gooding began DJing publicly, starting at a small wine bar near his home, and after visiting some of the larger dance clubs in his region, in particular Renaissance in Mansfield, he started his own Birmingham club night in collaboration with Phil Dockerty (later of Futureshock fame). He also took a day job at a local record shop, Global Grooves, and subsequently decided to found his own shop, Vinyl Matters. In 1996, thanks to his association with fellow British DJ/producer Steve Lawler, Gooding was offered a residency in Ibiza at Café Mambo, a laid-back open-air bar on San Antonio’s sunset strip where people went to experience nightfall. He held this residency for over a decade and impressed many with his stylistically diverse chillout sets. He also played uptempo sets of house music at other clubs in Ibiza and elsewhere, most notably forming an affiliation with Renaissance. Beginning in 1997 with the triple-disc Café Mambo, Gooding released mix albums more or less annually, most notable among them Café Mambo: The Real Sound of Ibiza (2000), Globalbeats -- Tide:Edit:06 (2001), Renaissance People (2002), Pete Gooding at Sosho (2006), Ibiza: The Sound of Renaissance, Vol. 3 (2006), and Ibiza: The Sound of Renaissance, Vol. 4 (2007). In addition to his DJ work and mix albums, Gooding also began producing his own music and remixing the work of others, beginning in 2001 in collaboration with Adam Routh as the duo Drax & Gooding. He also began collaborating with producer Steve Miller as No Logo in 2005 and founded his own label, Freefall Recordings, in 2006. ~ Jason Birchmeier