Fatboy Slim

Once upon a time there was Quentin Leo Cook, better known as Norman, bassist for the introverted, shadowy, working-class Housemartins from Kingston Upon Hull, whom he joined in 1985 (replacing Ted Key), just in time to take part in the jangle-pop masterpiece "London 0 Hull 4". A decade or so later, that kid had turned into Fatboy Slim, more or less the most famous and acrobatic DJ on the planet. It might look like an unfathomable, unpredictable mutation, yet no radioactive liquid fell on him Ninja Turtles-style, nor was he bitten by any spider. In truth, it was all already written.

Before being poached by his friend Paul Heaton of the Housemartins, with whom he studied in Brighton, Norman was already setting the local student scene alight behind the decks. In the melancholy Housemartins documentary "Whistle Test Documentary", which follows a typical day for the band in grey Hull, while some members of the group are sleeping or burning sausages, Norman is already hanging around the kitchen — except what he's spinning aren't plates of Heinz Beans and Portobello mushrooms, but records on a console, where he mixes Clash and Run DMC and introduces them to the camera as Clash DMC.

It was all already there. The class, the magic hands, the urge to have fun, the boundless passion for music, even an archetype of big beat: a straight, lively kick drum, rock, hip-hop, rhythm and fun. After all, as a good bassist Norman has always had a firm grasp of the quintessence of timing. His are hands of a clock to be broken apart and flung into the air like pieces of a vividly coloured mosaic, forming a rainbow — figuratively speaking, of course — of playful sounds, punchy rhythms, dizzying stop&go moments and breathtaking build-ups. Norman is the Merlin of big beat. Full stop. It's his top hat sitting on the console, from which anything and its opposite can be pulled out.

Beyond the samples — drawn from a supreme connoisseur of all music, ranging from Eric Burdon and War and The Archies ("Build It Up – Tear It Down") to Wreckx-N-Effect feat. Teddy Riley and Minimal Funk ("You're Not From Brighton"), via Robert Ascot and Archive ("Love Island") all the way to Ike Turner and The Kings of Rhythm and The Olympics ("Soul Surfing") — Cook hams it up like a sultan the whole way through. As well as being both standard-bearer and custodian of a phenomenon that, in the '90s, literally ransacked the charts and the dancefloor, the English musician embodies the all-round prototype of the "disc jockey", stepping past every stereotype that would confine the deserving master of the controls to a pen that's often improper, as well as ungenerous. It's also, and above all, his formula that helped make acts like Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Leftfield and their dancing companions great together, and that would go on to get entire coastlines dancing.

From Brighton to LA, from Miami to Naples: Norman flies over continents, rattles oceanic crowds, and laughs like a madman behind that cheeky British gaze of his. His style takes shape and substance in the mid-'90s with his longtime friends Tim Jeffery and JC Reid, with whom he forms Pizzaman, a house-leaning trio that in 1995 unleashed the sensational "Pizzamania", containing no fewer than three storming hits: "Trippin' on Sunshine", "Sex On The Streets" and "Happiness". But above all — get this — as the owner of a nightclub in Brighton, the Big Beat Boutique. Nomen omen, in other words. His signature touch would gradually morph over time into what could be called a sort of house-flavoured "patchanka". Norman knows no boundaries. There's no limit to his cravings: dub, jazz, rock, soul, funk and whatever else you can throw in. It's in this unmistakable melting pot of his that the indomitable spirit of a groove juggler resides.

Partly made up of tracks Cook had recorded before settling on the moniker Fatboy Slim, 1996's "Better Living Through Chemistry" — whose title pays tribute to the Chemical Brothers (who had pushed hard for its release) while also echoing a DuPont slogan that once encouraged the use of valium for children — is undoubtedly the record that cemented the producer's sound and aesthetic, and that of big beat itself: thick, pounding, acidic electronic music that's nonetheless vital and, when called for, joyous. In practice, it's the sound of the rave generation turned into an anthemic, accessible force, wrapping the masses in its mighty, pulsing tentacles.

It is, however, "You've Come A Long Way, Baby" that stands as Norman Cook's mature masterwork, the record that boosted its creator's fame and pushed the genre to its artistic and commercial peak (number one in the UK and New Zealand charts, platinum literally everywhere). The credit for the reach and greatness of Fatboy Slim's second album isn't purely musical, though. As with every record capable of crystallising an era, it was its ability to permeate contemporary popular culture — helped along by a genuine collateral iconography — that guaranteed its success.

The cover, for instance (at least in its European version), featuring some unidentified fat man smoking a cigarette at the Fat People's Festival in Danville while wearing a t-shirt that reads "I'm N. 1 SO Why Try Harder", but above all the videos, so successful that they monopolised heavy rotation on MTV. Raise your hand if you haven't been hypnotised dozens and dozens of times by the evolution (and devolution) of the species rendered in computer graphics to the beat and the ingenious string sample of "Right Here, Right Now", or if you haven't danced out of time and out of step like the revellers in the exuberant video for "Praise You". Directed by the Midas touch of Spike Jonze, the latter is a video so seemingly amateurish and slapdash that MTV didn't even want to air it — yet it went on to win Best Video at the channel's very own awards.

Listening to the best rock music, the involvement is often so total that it triggers in the listener the so-called air guitar (or its variants: air bass, air drums, and so on), that is, the mimed imitation of a solo or, more broadly, of a part of a song. Even though it's electronic music through and through, the tracks on "You've Come A Long Way, Baby" are so physical, and Fatboy's poses and knob-twiddling so vividly picturable (even without watching him), that they often trigger what we might call air DJing. Just think of when Cook wrings out "Rockafeller Skank" until the record seems to freeze, only to unleash the rhythm and bass all at once. You can practically see Fatboy, bending slowly over the decks, twisting his hand and arm around a knob, only to let go and burst upright along with the song. Or think of "Praise You", whose prodigious keyboard riff is made to vanish and reappear at will.

The record's opening is nothing short of legendary, with what Mixmag didn't hesitate to call one of the ten best dance songs of all time. Blending a string sample from the James Gang's "Ashes, The Rain and I" and a line of dialogue from Angela Bassett in Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days" with a galloping, rollicking rhythm, Fatboy Slim turns "Right Here Right Now" into the perfect chart-topping EDM bomb. A sci-fi-tinged track that would go on to be overused just as much on dancefloors as in sports commercials, video games and shopping malls.

Just to keep the pace and the fun going, right after that comes another single, the imperishable, frenzied "The Rockafeller Skank", presented on the record by a fictitious fan requesting it on the radio and reciting the lines "Right about now, the funk soul brother. Check it out now, the funk soul brother" with all due energy. Here too the choice of samples is crucial. The vocals come from a track by rapper Finesse of the D.I.T.C. crew, while the music lifts fragments from "Sliced Tomatoes" by the Just Brothers and "Beat Girl" by John Barry And His Orchestra. Hip-hop and soul reworked and recombined to the rhythm of typical big beat pounding, in a track that has no equal for immediacy and euphoria.

What is probably Norman Cook's single most famous track can thus stand as the theorem of his unrepeatable formula. On one side of the equation lies superhuman turntable skill and an innate sense of groove, on the other a love of music free of genre barriers and the ability to pull the right record out of the hat at the right moment. Less radio-friendly, "Gangster Trippin" and "Kalifornia" are two more typically DJ-oriented numbers. The first is a woozy breakbeat party, with drum cymbals so wide open they sound like they're right there in the room with you. The second is a highly acidic track with venomous keyboards staging a chemical rave. The melody, however, is all in all sunny, generating a unique interplay of contrasts. The sun is dazzling and beats down hard on "Soul Surfing" too, a sweaty, slightly boorish beach party that stretches the album's influences all the way to surf music.

The heaviest dose of acid arrives at the close, programmatically titled "Acid 8000" and made up of a good seven minutes of crackling synths, tempo changes, silvery flangers, echoes and wailing sirens. This is arguably the track most in line with the dictates of the Chemical Brothers and rave culture, entirely geared towards reaching chemical ecstasy. A moment that winks at the earlier "You're Not From Brighton", another miracle loosely in the wake of "french touch", with the variant of a rhythm section halfway between big beat and synth-funk. Epic stuff to be handed down to future generations who'll want to shake it behind the decks on some Ibizan shore.

The preachers of the mash-up that would soon take over every self-respecting club and beach, starting with the divine 2 Many DJ's, owe essentially everything to Fatboy Slim. The last jester to fall to earth.

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08/08/2021