Fatboy Slim: Right Here, Right Now
Norman Cook's come a long way, baby.
Words by Zara Richards
Image supplied
Starting his career as a bass player in indie-rock outfit The Housemartins, the producer fused his love for punk, hip-hop and acid-house to pioneer the sample-based big beat genre that's caused dancefloors to groove in unison since the '90s.
Now, he's better known as one of the world's best DJs: Fatboy Slim. Ahead of his A Day On The Green tour – which visits the Barossa Valley this March – he speaks with The Note about the sample that changed his life, creating shared musical experiences and why being slapped across the face is his performance prerequisite
Australia is a country that’s welcomed you with open arms for the better part of three decades. When did it click that you had a fanbase here? And when did you fall in love with us?
I first came with [musical collective] Beats International at the beginning of the ’90s [Australia] is the other side of the world, but then you get there and it feels familiar because we speak the same language and have the same sense of humour and style. It’s a really interesting mix of the exotic and the familiar. We just seem to click, you know – you and me.
So, from the off, I had a fabulous time. By the time I came back as Fatboy Slim, I think I had more of a reputation as a party animal, and obviously, a few Australians share the same kind of tendency. From that day, it was like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s do this. Let’s see how outrageous we can be and how far we can push the limits of hedonism’. We’ve been continuing it on various levels ever since.
What shows stick out in your mind when you think of Australia?
The first time it really took off was Big Day Out [in 1999] – we did the Boiler Room. You couldn’t get into the tent and people were climbing up the poles! I was against Hole and Marilyn Manson on the main stage, but there was this group of people who were like, ‘We get what you’re doing’. It’s about the hottest I’ve ever been on stage, between the Australian weather and the amount of people we had in the tent.
You fused the DIY elements of punk with your love for funk, hip- hop and house to pioneer this big beat genre, which still transcends generations. Tell us about developing this sound and the excitement that followed when it broke into the mainstream.
You nailed it – it was the hooks of pop music, the attitude of punk, the breakbeats of hip-hop and the energy of acid-house. As I started messing with those elements, they just hit. I had this club that I played at every week in Brighton where I would try these things out, and people would be like, ‘Yeah we like this, these are the best bits of all different sorts of music’. It just gelled. It was very exciting to realise that, especially at that point because I was 15 years into my career – that’s when I thought I should be thinking about retirement. But I had actually hit on something people were really digging.
The other elements I understood, but the new bit was the sampling – the idea of putting records together, totally made out of other bits of records, like a collage. There were people like me, Coldcut and The Chemical Brothers swapping ideas. It felt like we were inventing a new thing. That made it even more exciting because we were messing around with the music we loved and making something new that had never been done before.
When you look at your catalogue retrospectively, what sample feels like it changed your career?
When I hit ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ – that was when I knew I’d nailed it. I had been playing a Northern Soul rhythm track called ‘Sliced Tomatoes’ in my DJ set and noticed people were like, ‘Oh, this is a groove’. I then had this sample of a guy – Lord Finesse – saying, ‘Check it out right about now / It’s no other than the funk soul brother’. When I put that over [‘Sliced Tomatoes’] and the rhythm came in, I was like, ‘That sounds like a hook, that sounds catchy’. The first time I made an acetate of it, I played it in the club to gauge people’s reactions and everyone went crazy. I got really excited and was saying, ‘This is me! This is me!’ and they all went, ‘We know’. They could tell it had all my ingredients. That was the first time I thought, ‘Oh my God, this sounds like a pop record’. It’s completely wrong – the bit where it slows down and deconstructs – but it still sounded like a pop record, an experimental one.
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Every time we see you perform, you’re barefoot, swinging your headphones around and turning the energy up to 10. Where does Norman Cook end and Fatboy Slim start for you?
Fatboy starts when I’m in the dressing room. Just before I go on, I take off my shoes, put on a Hawaiian shirt and get slapped around the face. That allows me to stop being the sensible, responsible father of two and I can become this party idiot.
I spent my first 20 years playing in nightclubs and there’s a level of performance to that, but you’re just the guy in the corner playing records. As we got more popular, I was being put on stages at festivals following rock bands. They’d wheel all the drum kits and amps off the stage, put this table at the front with two record players on it, and I’d have to walk out and try and fill that stage. So, showboating becomes part of trying to make a performance out of a bloke playing records. As the years have progressed, we can use audio-visual gags and more bells and whistles. But also, I’m a natural-born show-off. I try to temper it in my normal life, but when I become Fatboy Slim, I let it all out. I love it. But it’s showbiz – you try to give a good show to people by whatever means necessary.
There must be massive energy reverberating off the crowd, too. The audiences you garner are reflective of the community that surrounds raving – inclusive and welcoming – which couldn’t have been more obvious than when 250,000 somewhat behaved punters rocked up to your famous Big Beach Boutique II show in 2002. How has community defined your career?
It’s absolutely paramount. The reason we want to go out and celebrate life with all these people via the medium of very loud music is, I think, part of our psyches. [Music] is like sports events or religion, you know – it’s a way of being surrounded by people who you feel a connection with. That’s a powerful thing. In my DJ sets, it’s something I think about in the music I play. I try to bring people together and say, ‘Look, we are all one. Just for this moment, just for tonight, we can forget all our problems and we can be together as this utopian disco organism’.
Is that what motivates you now? Creating a shared musical experience?
Before recorded music there were troubadours. They’d go from one town to another, singing songs that told stories about where they’d been. And that, before newspapers and the internet, was how stories went. I’ve got this notion that I’m this troubadour – I get to go around the world, connecting people and telling stories. I know it’s a very romantic notion, but it works for me and it keeps me going. I’m not trying to change the world. When I started with The Housemartins, we were quite political and thought maybe we could change the world. But over my lifetime, that’s been beaten out of me. I don’t think I can change the world. But I can engender these moments where we can escape from the harshness of reality or the boredom – we can escape for a couple of hours and connect with each other in a different way.
See Fatboy Slim At A Day On The Green at Peter Lehmann Wines on March 21. Tickets on sale now via ticketmaster.com.au.
