And the winner is....Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim
(facebook)Norman Cook still heads into his studio to chop up other people’s tracks for use in his DJ sets, to which end, he clicks a button on his laptop and out bursts a highly improbable mash-up of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Armand Van Helden’s New York City Beat, The Incredible Bongo Band’s Apache and Prokoviev’s Peter And The Wolf, which is simultaneously brilliant, entirely ridiculous and the kind of idea that only Norman Cook would have. But at the moment, he’s concentrating on DJing rather than making records. “I did 70 gigs last year,” he says. “I’ve never done that many before. I’m just really enjoying doing the gigs, as a career. This is my job, I love doing it, I still seem to be getting away with it.”
That’s certainly one way of putting it. In Brazil, Cook has become – to his faintly baffled delight, “more famous than I am in England”, as a result of the DVD of his Brighton Big Beach Boutique II event becoming the must-have item for clubbers wanting to show off their flat-screen TVs. “They basically all watched the DVD of Brighton Beach and went: that’s our idea of a fantastic party. So, a promoter got Nokia involved, they paid for everything. We ended up with 360,000 people on Flamingo beach in Rio. It went out live on the telly. It was the biggest thing in dance music that had every happened in Brazil. That launched a whole career for me playing in Brazil. I love going there. It’s a fantastic country, amazing music, people and culture and food. I started spending a month of the year there. I went and DJed in the Big Brother house! And then, just out of sheer why’s-no-one-ever-done-that-before, I played at the Salvador Carnival in Bahia. 5 million people on the streets, me on an articulated lorry with a proper sound system on the top. It’s normally just samba bands, but I did it and everyone went nuts.”
These days, Cook’s show involves not just playing his own-patented brand of “party acid house”, but a complex audio-visual production. “I’m technically a video jockey now. We write scripts for all the tunes, make films. In the past, I used to have to literally hold up the next record I was going to play to the guy who does my visuals, and he’d have to find the images to match it. And they were never synched. But now, because of the technology, no matter what speed I play at, even if I just chop quickly into it, the visuals are all synchronized. It’s a show.”
No one knows what the cut-off age limit of a DJ is. And apparently, it’s not yet.” Norman Cook roars with laughter. “I take great delight in that.”
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