'You soundtrack peoples' lives': Fatboy Slim on success, sobriety and Indiependence

Ed Power chats to Norman Cook ahead of a return to an Irish crowd at Indiependence

Norman Cook: Fatboy Slim has worn a lot of musical hats over the years

It was while watching EastEnders one evening that Norman Cook realised how big a star he had become. “One of my first proud moments was when one of my tunes was on the jukebox in the Queen Vic,” says the artist who, as Fatboy Slim, blazed an all-conquering trail through 1990s pop and now returns to headline Cork’s Indiependence Festival in July.

“Being part of pop culture as well as of pop music – it makes it more emotive. What I love about pop music is it’s not just purely music on its own. You soundtrack people’s lives.” 

Scrawny and with the body language of an over-enthusiastic applied maths lecturer, Cooke was an unlikely chart-topper. But in his commercial prime he was one of the biggest stars in pop. His music was everywhere – all across radio, on TV shows, playing over ads.

That full-throttle career was accompanied by a full-throttle lifestyle. The good times were great, he says. But the party had to end eventually. Which it did when he gave up drinking in 2009 and checked into rehab. 

He has no regrets about having lived life to the max through the 1990s. In the end, however, he simply couldn’t continue in the fast lane. He was running out of road.

“I don’t want to be a poster boy for sobriety,” he says. “It’s worked for me. It’s prolonged my career. I don’t think I could physically take the pace if I was still partying. It’s made me cherish what I do. When I was drinking I did everything by instinct. I put a lot more thought into it these days.” 

Cook’s music soundtracked an era. And to this day his biggest hits can trigger an onrush of memory. Praise You’s opening riff and its video featuring ironically awful dancers in a Los Angeles shopping mall. The Rockafeller Skank and its chorus of “Right About Now – the Funk Soul Brother”. Christopher Walken zooming around on wires in the video to Weapon Of Choice (directed by Spike Jonze, who also masterminded the Praise You promo). 

Fatboy Slim: "sobriety has worked" for the pop hitmaker

If you’re of a certain vintage, it’s enough to sweep you back to the heady days of Britpop, England losing on penalties at Euro 96 and the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger.

“I remember doing the interviews at the time and saying, ‘I don’t expect this music to be played in 10 years time. This is the sound of now’,” says Cook. “And I remember getting told off for it: ‘don’t undersell yourself – this music isn’t disposable’. You never dream you’ll be anything more than something people dance to – a soundtrack to a Saturday night out.” 

He became so successful that he crossed over into the world of celebrity. His fame largely flowed from his relationship with radio presenter Zoe Ball, whom he married in 1999. Inevitably, the fascination with their relationship turned to prurience when they split in January 2003 only to reconcile three months later. Fifteen years on, they announced their separation for good. They have two children, Woody, 21, and Nelly, 11.

Cook’s journey in music is even more colourful than the portrait of his private life painted by the tabloids. He grew up in the London commuter town of Reigate Surrey, where he took violin lessons alongside future British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer.

Having played in punk bands from age 14, one day he met songwriter Paul Heaton in a pub in Reigate. Heaton invited Cook to move to Hull and join his band The Housemartins.

They had huge success with songs such as Happy Hour and Caravan of Love. But when Heaton moved on to The Beautiful South, Cook relocated to Brighton, where he had a hit with the dance floor project Beats International and 1990’s Dub Be Good To Me. He was topping the charts again with the group Freak Power and their sleaze-funk 1994 single Turn On, Tune In, Cope Out, which achieved prominence on the back of a Levis ad.

Fatboy Slim: "no regrets" about life at its pop peak

Number ones were great. DJing and production remained his passion, however. And by the mid-1990s he had adopted the pseudonym Fatboy Slim for his adventures behind the decks. “It’s just an oxymoron. It kind of suits me,” he said of the moniker, “it’s kind of goofy and ironic.” All of which led up to his steamrolling of the Top 10 in 1998 with The Rockafeller Skank, with its monster-truck groove and nagging “Silver Surfer, Silver Surfer” refrain.

He was the toast of the industry. Critics loved him. “A seamless record, filled with great imagination, unexpected twists and turns, huge hooks, and great beats,” said All Music of his second Fatboy Slim record, You’ve Come A Long Way Baby.

“This is the huge, throbbing, timely pinnacle of a style which Cook himself pioneered,” agreed the NME. Q Magazine praised the project’s “Cheshire cat-sized slice of grinning humour thrown in too”. Cook was grinning even more as it went on to sell five million copies.

One reason his hits are so catalysed in our imagination is that Cook gave up making music the moment it ceased to interest him. There are just four Fatboy Slim LPs, the last of which - Palookaville - came out all the way back in 2004.

He did go on to write a musical about Imelda Marcos called ‘Here Lies Love’ with David Byrne of Talking Heads. Since then, though, it has been largely quiet on the Norman front. He cannot be accused of inflicting too many Cooks on an unsuspecting world.

“I haven’t felt a passion to make music in the studio for 10 years now. Because of that, I don’t feel I should go through the motions and do it,” he says.

“I just sort of swerved it. Basically, I’ve got a passion for DJing that doesn’t seem to have waned. In fact, it seems to grow the older I get. It’s so difficult to make yourself heard in this business. You’re only going to do it if it’s something you’re passionate about. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I’m spent. I made an awful lot of records for a long time. Or maybe, when I’m too old to DJ, I’ll go back to making records. I don’t want to inflict music on people unless I 100 per cent believe in it. And have a passion to do it.” 

Fatboy Slim: careful about a return to original music

Cook lives on a beachfront property in Brighton with his son and daughter. Obviously, the pandemic was a challenge. But with sea and sand outside their front door, there were worse places to spend lockdown.

“It wasn’t all bad. I’m very lucky because I had both my kids with me. We live on the beach. The weather was very good that first summer. It wasn’t all doom and gloom. At that point we thought – ‘six months and we’ll be back in the autumn’. So there’s been highs and lows. In the end, when autumn set in and my son had gone off to university and my daughter was back in school, that’s when the walls started closing in. I got myself a job in a local cafe (the Big Beach Café, of which Cook is a part-owner). That kept my connection with the outside world. And hence my sanity.” 

A job in the local cafe? So if someone had walked into a random coffee shop in Brighton in 2020, Norman Cook – most influential DJ of his generation – might have made their flat white?

“I would have taken your order. You’ll be pleased to know I wouldn’t have made the flat white. I’m not barista-trained. I would have taken your order and then I would have brought it over to you. I’m a very social animal. But also prone to be a show-off. And a show-off with nobody to show off to is kind of like a beached whale.”

• Fatboy Slim headlines Indiependence 2022, running at Mitchelstown, Co Cork, July 29 – 31