BC045 - DJ Q&A: Norman Cook (July 2011)
From Beats International to Fatboy Slim, looking back with the Brighton big beat domo
via Insomniac
Norman Cook isn’t remotely “cool” in DJ circles, and once upon a time I considerably overstated his talents on the decks. But On the Floor at the Boutique (Skint, 1998), the first mix CD he issued as Fatboy Slim, still does the business, even if you find it and/or its era a little too boffo. (Which is also fair.) When I talked to him a dozen years ago for my second NPR Music piece leading the way to The Underground Is Massive, Cook was reflective and sharp—good memory, practiced with the media but still spontaneous. And he’s also made more than his share of classics—I’ll never forget seeing Juan Atkins in a little Brooklyn basement spot on New Year’s Eve ’12 dropping Mighty Dub Katz’s “Just Another Groove,” aka Cook’s edit of “Disco Juice.” Anyway, this still reads sharply, so enjoy.
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You have been recording dance music for a long time; I remember Beats International in 1990. At that time, rave had been going on in England for a couple of years. Did you consider yourself part of that during the time of Beats International?
I definitely wasn’t part of rave. I was still playing in the Housemartins when rave happened. For me, it’s just a continuation of general, common-garden dance music, as opposed to kind of a rave revolution. What I first started doing it, it was new wave mixed in with electro when it first came out, and that begat hip-hop and rare groove and funk. It was, for me, all mixed into one.
The Housemartins really didn’t go to America, because I think you need to have a certain kind of ego to be satisfied to break a market that big that’s on the other side of the world.
I’m curious if you ever saw America as a place you might have an audience for your dance work in?
No. The whole Fatboy Slim project—it was never intended to sell albums or go to America. That crept up on us. I remember when I signed to Astralwerks, I remember they said, “Do you know that you’re coming to America?” It happened organically through the clubs rather than through working that hard; totally unplanned.
I grew up listening to what we now call dance music, but when I was young we called black music: the pioneering music through soul right up to house music. It was always made predominantly by black Americans, who were predominantly ignored in America, who’d come over to Europe to make it.
I talked to Adam Shore from TVT who told me he flew out to sign you and got turned down by the head of the company, who didn’t think he could make any money from it.
That was the Mighty Dub Katz, not Fatboy Slim.
That was ’95 or so?
Yeah, and that was pure house music, and that would have been difficult to sell, to get onto American radio.
How does Fatboy Slim become its own project? Did you decide, “I’m going to work with breakbeats instead of making house music?”
I never fully embraced house music. I always kind of liked my hip-hop and reggae roots, so I never fully immersed in it. I was making records as Mighty Dub Katz and as Pizzaman, sort of out-there house records.
You recorded for Southern Fried?
That’s my label.
That’s what I was going to ask. I think there was a compilation on Sm:)e with a lot of Southern Fried stuff. Were you ever approached by an American label to do a distribution deal for Southern Fried?
I do the A&R rather than the business end, so I don’t really know the answer to that.
But you did a lot of licensing songs for compilations and things like that?
Yeah. In the early days we licensed a lot of stuff to Sm:)e and TVT, stuff like that. Sm:)e kind of broke the Dub Katz in America as an underground dance act. They were very keen, but like I said, purely as a club-oriented thing rather than a pop sound.
Fatboy Slim was your project for Skint. You put out the first couple of 12-inches. How soon do you hear from America on this?
It was quite fairly early on at an underground level. At that point, a lot of it—the sound most attuned to what we were doing was what we called West Coast breakbeat. There was a scene in L.A. and San Francisco where people were into a very similar thing—people like the Bassbin Twins and—who are those cats in Vegas? The Crystal Method. They were kindred spirits. We got [played] early by them, just because we were the only people making that music. But then Astralwerks were fairly quick on the scene, I think mainly because they were run by English people in those days.
They were subsidiary to Virgin in America. Errol Kolosine told me that they basically got all the stuff Virgin America didn’t know how to market, and they did.
Yeah. At the time it was kind of a European people who were making this brand of dance music that might be commercial. But yeah, they had a run. I’ve probably got the Chemical Brothers to thank for Astralwerks coming over to see us. But then that begat Basement Jaxx and—who else?
Air?
Air, yeah. We became just a big gang, the Astralwerks gang.
Was that social, or did you just happen to be on the same label?
A bit of both. Obviously, me and the Chemical Brothers were mates, and we used to DJ together all the time. Me and the Chemical Brothers were like an extended family. The Jaxx we knew quite well. Air, we didn’t know quite so well.
Were you social before the label stuff with Astralwerks?
It was probably Tom and Ed who told Astralwerks about me. We used to DJ together at the Heavenly Social.
Can you give me some background on the Heavenly Social?
I had this sound, which sort of became big beat. A few friends in London said, “You know those tunes you always play that no one else plays? We’ve found this club in London with these guys who play the same stuff.” They dragged me up there, and that’s when I met Tom and Ed. I walked in and Tom and Ed were playing one of my records, “Santa Cruz.” I went up and introduced myself and they were, “Ahhh! Right!” In those days, we were sort of in the minority of people that had a different idea that wasn’t out-and-out house. Immediately, they gave me a job DJ’ing there. There was Jon Carter, a whole gang of us, Richard Fearless, Tom and Ed and me. The Social was sort of our clubhouse, a meeting of the minds and shopping ideas and doing quite a lot of drinking as well.
Where was the Social located?
It was originally in a pub called the Albany. It ended up, most famously, in Turnips. This is in London. What happened is, I’d be playing there, so I’d trek up to London every weekend. The gang of us would drive up from Brighton, and said, “Why don’t we have our own club in Brighton doing the same thing?” So we started the Big Beat Boutique.
Where was that located?
Brighton, right by the pier.
Do you remember the first time you were contacted from an American label who was interested in signing Fatboy Slim?
The first thing I remember was the Astralwerks contingent coming to see me when we did Skint Fridays at The End in London. I had a residency there. They started coming there. But like I said, I wasn’t interested in America at that point. My manager probably had more of a handle on what was going on than me.
Do you have any sense of which year it was? There was a year gap.
Between it coming out in America and England? A friend of mine, Ken Friedman, came over to sign me a bit before that. We ended up being really good friends. He was running Nothing Records—Trent Reznor’s label. Ken got really drunk and ended up missing my set. He was introduced to me at the after-party. I said, “What are you doing in England?” He said, “I came over to sign Fatboy Slim.” I said, “How did that go?” He said, “Oh, I got really drunk and missed his set.” We ended up being really firm friends. He now runs the Spotted Pig in New York, which I’m one of the investors in. He ended up being one of my best friends, but we never worked together.
You ended up signing with Astralwerks and put out the first album in America. Were you surprised by the response it got?
The thing I was surprised by was, I went to play shows and kids going, “You sold out because you signed to a major label.” They explained that dance music liked to remain underground in America. They thought I was selling out because I’d signed to Astralwerks rather than a proper indie. Which seemed like a really obtuse way of looking at it: “Because Astralwerks is part of a major, you’ve sold out to the Man and have become part of the machine.” I suppose it went fairly quickly from the West Coast breakbeat scene and underground clubs—it went overground quite quickly. The whole big beat thing seems like it was such an obvious idea, the ingredients of it. Why not? Why can’t you mix these things together?
You came over as a DJ. That’s what you do. Was it surprising to people? Were people expecting you to come over as a live act?
I had a reputation as a DJ as Norman Cook rather than as Fatboy Slim. I’d do the circuit—the East and West Coast, not so much the center of America. I had a name for myself playing in underground clubs. When it took off, and we started putting it in ballrooms and things, I’d get there in the afternoon and people would say, “Are you in Fatboy Slim?” The first time I was playing those venues, you could see people looking around, realizing, “This is it. You just get a DJ, don’t you? There’s no drum kit. There’s no band.” But I think pretty soon people twigged on that.
Before You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, you put out my favorite recording of yours, On the Floor at the Boutique. Was it your idea to do a series?
Yeah. At that point, the Social and the Boutique were the focal points for what had become a movement. It had a name. Obviously, in those days, compilations used to outsell artist albums. Those were very potent forces. Tom and Ed had done a compilation for Virgin. I think everybody just wanted a compilation for this new sound. A lot of the records we were playing were sort of obscure and eclectic. Everybody was clamoring for a compilation album of this new sound. It struck us that the best thing was for it to be branded through our club. We [took] control of it; it came out on Skint. It was eight friends who ran the Boutique, Skint Records, and me.
Was it hard to license stuff for it? I remember reading that you wanted to license Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic” for it and couldn’t.
Yeah, a few of the older things we couldn’t get. People didn’t understand [why they’d be] on a club compilation.
How many passes did it take to get the track list right? Was it drawn out?
There was such a wealth of tunes we wanted to use. It was what we could get the license[s] for.
Did you put “Rockafeller Skank” out and continue working on You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, or was the album finished when you released the single?
“Rockafeller Skank” came out the week I finished the album, I think. An anticipation had built up, and a feeling that what we were doing was the right thing at the right time. What I remember about the album is that we had to finalize it and get it out.
A quote from the time I remember from Spin: “I went to New York and bought a bunch of hip-hop records and I’m going to rip them all off.”
[laughs] Well, I was misquoted. They wouldn’t have been hip-hop. They would have been old funk records. I already had all the hip-hop records. I used to chill at A1 Records, and thrift stores were the best to buy eclectic-looking mid-’70s records where everyone on the cover looked like they took drugs. Multi-racial [bands] that looked like they took drugs were usually my best material.
Were drugs integral to big beat?
They were, yes. In the way that it was a mixture of house attitude and hip-hop attitude, it was a mixture of ecstasy and cocaine, I think. Probably more ecstasy than cocaine, though. It was kind of a mixture of rave vs. rock and roll—cherry-picked the best bits of both.
You came to America to DJ for You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. How did the crowds differ?
It wasn’t just underground, hardcore clubbers. It was people who heard me on the radio. It was very exciting to take dance music out of underground clubs and take it to places like Woodstock, to turn people on who’d never heard dance music, which in America was quite easy to do, since it wasn’t being played on the radio. One of the criticisms of me was, “Norman just makes dance music for people who don’t like dance music.” I see that as a compliment.
Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars was a much more serious album—much more consciously serious.
Yes. In the mental two years in between, I think it got a bit out of hand. I’d been in the music business by that point for 15 years, just skirting on the edge of fame. Between that and marrying my wife [Zoe Ball; they’re now divorced—MM], who’s a TV presenter, the whole tabloid-fame thing got way out of hand. I always wanted to make dance music that was accessible. But I was kind of up there with Robbie Williams thinking, “I don’t know if I deserve this, or want to be here.” Also, the whole big beat thing got out of hand. It had got a bit frat-boy: “Wheee! Let’s all get drunk and party!” I took a step back, took my foot off the gas a bit in the kind of speed my life was going. I was trying to get a bit more serious and more reflective. Some might argue that wasn’t the best career move for me. In terms of sales, I think it probably was a bad move. In terms of popularity longevity, I think it was a good move. I didn’t just hit with another album that sounds the same. Especially in Europe, they’ll respect you for that. In England ten years down the line, you’re still respected, which in the end means more to me than sales or money.
The last three track feel like a suite—like you’re trying to sum up that period.
I think maybe after the album before, we thought, “This is it, get it out.” We didn’t bother to think about the order the tunes were in. With this we were like, “Kids are listening to this. You’d better make sure it’s good.” We took a lot of time to figure out the way it ebbed and flowed. Starting it very, very understated was probably not a good idea commercially, but what the hell?
I took my foot off the gas. I wasn’t coming to America quite so often. Maybe my management sensed it. We weren’t getting these enormous offers, doing bigger and more mental parties than we’d done before. In the meantime, Brazil was and Japan was and Australia was, so I went off there.
Were a lot of people shifting away from the U.S.?
It was one of those things where—you know, like a party and everyone’s going, “That was really great, but I’m a bit knackered now. Maybe it’s kind of not fun anymore. Maybe it’s time to go home.” I think there was a collective kind of [feeling], both with the artists and the audience, there was a [sense of], “That was great, but parties can’t go on forever.”