Wednesday lunch and a restaurant on Hove’s coast are served a drum and bass remix of Althea & Donna’s 1978 regatta hit Uptown Top Ranking. You could call the volume playing on the rattling of cutlery if there were cutlery in the restaurant that rattled, but no. The service is stopped, the tables are pushed aside, and in the center of the room Norman Cook teaches Jess and Amber, two twenty-something women, how to DJ: headphones in one ear just so you can hear the song you’re pointing up while listening the song currently playing with the other. This is a task that he approaches with great enthusiasm and a delightful lack of pretensions – “They make a kind of” wow “sound”, he shrugs his shoulders, showing the buttons on the mixer filter – which is also extremely engaging for anyone who is followed Cook’s career as Fatboy Slim, not so much of a surprise.
In the late 1990s, when the superstar of the DJ era, when some of his peers were used to making startling statements, Paul Oakenfold justified his fees, noting that he didn’t just play records, he also raised his hands, pointing at people in the crowd smiled, concluding, “I’m an artist.” Cook regularly drew anger by refusing to take his work so seriously. “A monkey can do what I do,” was one of his most famous statements. He doesn’t say anything like that today – “I think,” he smiles, “I was probably a little modest when I said these things because I was a musician. [in the Housemartins] and all my musician friends were like “but you just play records” – but he suggests to his students that the most important thing to remember about the mixer filter knobs is to “make a face when you’re turning them over” . “This is mine,” he added, leaning forward and throwing his head back in apparent ecstasy.
Manipulating music centers you. So it’s nice to see people who have struggled to go through this process
Cook is here as part of an NHS charity-funded arts organization for people with severe mental health problems, which also includes singing workshops, samba lessons and sound therapy. “I really wanted to make music accessible to everyone,” said Natalie Rowlands, a senior occupational therapist who programs events, “to break the stigma of mental illness, build people’s trust and have really high-end music seminars in really nice places.” Many of the people here have been musicals in the past, but they’ve been through so much that they’re coming out of it again, and it’s an incredible opportunity. ”
“Natalie reached out to me and sounded interesting,” Cook nodded. It’s really kind of life-affirming, it’s nice to see people who have never touched a set of tests before switching between two songs and thinking, “Wow!” Sometimes I can get upset about what I’m doing for a given work, and see this innocent joy of the way you can manipulate the music: it’s exciting, it centers you, it gives you a pleasant warm feeling. So it’s nice to see people who have struggled to get through this process. “
Brighton rocked… 250,000 fans showed up at the Big Beach boutique in 2002. Photo: Everynight Images / Alamy
It seems a little unbelievable that Cook has time to get involved. At 58 years old – and almost a quarter of a century after Fatboy Slim’s commercial peak as a recording artist – his DJ schedule sounds exhausting: Switzerland, Poland, Glastonbury, France, Berlin. Two nights in Brighton Beach, celebrating the 20th anniversary of his Big Beach Boutique event, which legendaryly attracted 250,000 people and brought the city to a standstill: there was so much fuss that Cook later left the country at the suggestion of his then-neighbor Paul McCartney. “It turns out that if you bring all the people who go to small nightclubs in one place, there are a lot of us,” he said. “This is limited to 7,500 people, they are in the barn on the beach and no glass is allowed on site. This is a very big Beach Boutique. ”
It all comes as a huge relief after what he calls an “interesting” block. “My whole job is to get a lot of people to communicate and do everything we shouldn’t have done. For the first two weeks I thought: what should I do?
Like many DJs, he publishes weekly mixes online, “which kept my mental health on track and I had the free summer I’ve always promised myself. Then in the fall my son went to university and my daughter went back to school and the walls started to close after a while. ”
He eventually took a job at the cafe he owns in Hove. “We had a Covid case, we lost two-thirds of our staff and so it was either stopped or all hands on deck. I worked there for seven months. People were going to walk along the coast because that’s all they were allowed to do and they drank their coffee there at the end of the walk, so we felt like the last bastion of community and connection. It was interesting because I’ve never done an honest job in years. That kept me sane, really. But the return was joyful. “
The return … Fatboy Slim played Coachella 2022 last April. Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images for Coachella
In May 2021, he performed a maskless show in Liverpool as part of the government’s event research program to see if it was viable to return to mass gatherings. “It was just weird. There was this thing: “If this develops, it can be crammed for another six months. Our job was to test first and then go all-in and just lick our faces and get involved properly and see what happens, which we were all ready to do. I felt weird for the first two minutes, and then… ”He smiles. “It was when the clock struck 12 on New Year’s Eve, but all night. Just kiss strangers, hug strangers because you can. DJing is a two-way street, it’s a conversation, if you’re DJing without an audience, for a live broadcast or whatever, it’s just a middle-aged man playing records in his kitchen. You forget the euphoria and the relationship. Within three minutes was “why is my heart beating so fast?” Oh, I’m excited, I’m excited to be here. I remember that feeling. “
Regardless of Covid, Cook’s DJ career seems to have simply evolved to fill the arena, unaffected by changing times, tastes, or indeed his decision to more or less stop making his own music. He told the Guardian in the early 00’s that if his records stopped selling, he would “seriously consider packing everything” and was true to his word after Palookaville’s 2004 failed to match the platinum success on Fatboy Slim’s previous albums. His 2009 album Brighton Port Authority – which came with countless stellar guests, including Iggy Pop and Dizzee Rascal and a complex backstory involving the career of a fake band – attracted few people. Since then, he has released only a handful of songs, although one of them, Eat Sleep Rave Repeat from 2013, was a provocative meme hit in the Top 3: variations of his title circulate online to this day. “My enthusiasm for recording has diminished a bit. But my enthusiasm for DJing has never diminished. And because I like it so much, it’s not just touring the arena, I play in clubs all year round. It’s like a week for freshmen – the new receptions are ahead in the clubs. There are children who say “My parents played your records when I grew up” and since I play at their local club down the road, they come to see me out of interest and… “- he laughs -” the other soul is mine “
Family fun… Cook with daughter Nelly at Camp Bestival in 2021 Photo: Dan Reid / Rex / Shutterstock
However, there are certain markers of the passing of time, not least the fact that his children have started DJing. His 10-year-old daughter Nelly took part in a live broadcast for Camp Bestival during the blockade: there was a great moment when Cook tried to fix something on the mixer and was kicked out. Meanwhile, his son Woody is “full-time – he did five concerts last week. He started DJing because his roommate was a DJ. Two months after leaving home, “I’m going to be a DJ now.” All those years when I could pass on my wisdom and he didn’t want to know! Last summer he played in Ibiza in Mambo and I was in the DJ booth with him. As the sun set, he played At the River on Groove Armada and I burst into tears! I remember when he was sitting in the corner of the DJ booth, he couldn’t even see from above – it was the only safe place to put him, because there was such chaos around. Me and Zoe [Ball, his ex-wife] never, never imposed it on any of them. But he loves him and chooses him completely independently. “
So there seem to be at least some of the participants in today’s seminar. I’m talking briefly to Jess, a 34-year-old drummer who was in music school while her mental health “hit me hard.” She says she came at the suggestion of her assistant – “You can just disappear into nothingness in art, but you just have to stay somehow and put yourself back there.” She found the beat coincidence quite easy and “genuinely liked it”: “It makes you want to chase him more and think, ‘I’m good enough, I exist in this world, I haven’t just passed it.’
Back in the restaurant, the sound of drum’n’bass still rings. Another participant seems to have fully learned to mix, including the filter knobs. Cook steps back and watches. “Well, now I have nothing more to teach you,” he smiles and gives her five.
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