He's come a long way, baby, from Bromley to Redhill to Brighton to Hull and back to Brighton again, arriving comfortably at the top deck of dance music's evolutionary scale. Fatboy Slim has crawled out of clubland's primordial swamp and achieved supremacy just by standing up, putting a record on the turntable, and letting it spin. Like the invention of the wheel, it all seems so simple that you wonder why someone hadn't done it before.
Of course, Norman Cook is not the first DJ to hit the big-time, but somehow this skinny 35-year-old English bloke has managed to reach hitherto unscaled heights of celebrity, a rarefied place usually reserved for traditional, guitar-wielding rock gods. Since he left the Housemartins more than a decade ago, Cook has hardly touched a stringed instrument, yet he now commands pop star status equal to if not greater than his former band-mates in The Beautiful South. His current album, You've Come A Long Way, Baby, has gone platinum in the US, outselling the Ego himself, Robbie Williams, and Cook is now playing to the kind of crowds normally seen at football matches and U2 gigs. You don't need a Darwinist - or a music journalist for that matter - to help you reach the logical conclusion that Fatboy Slim is now the biggest DJ in the universe. Cook himself, however, is still unconvinced.
"I never believe anything I read in the papers," he says. "But I have been on a bit of a roll in the last six months, yeah. I'm not moaning."
And well he mightn't moan. Things have been looking so bright for Fatboy Slim lately, he has to wear shades - big, bold, 1970s cop show shades. When Rockafeller Skank crashed the Top 10 last year, it marked Cook's graduation from remixing other people's hits to having hits of his own. Earlier in 1998, his remix of Cornershop's Brimful Of Asha sent the Asian indie band straight into the Number One slot, and his remix of Wildchild's Renegade Master became one of the biggest floor-fillers of the year. It was inevitable that Cook would eventually chart in his own right - Rockafella Skank was followed into the Top Ten by Gangsta Trippin', Praise You and - most recently -
Right Here, Right Now.
Cook has been reading a lot about himself in the papers lately - not only in the music papers and DJ mags, but also in the tabloid press. For a man who likes to remain anonymous, and whose only vices appear to be smoking fags, necking Budweiser and dancing rather comically, this is a strange turn-up for the books. The reason for this unwarranted interest in nondescript Norman? Easy - his fiancee is Radio 1 personality and media ladette Zoe Ball, which makes Cook more than just a DJ. He's now one half of that rare breed, the celebrity couple, and he joins that exclusive club which includes Jay Kay and Denise Van Outen, Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, and Posh Spice and David Beckham.
"I kind of have become tabloid fodder, not because of anything I've done, but for my choice of wife. I'm still the same old drunken idiot I ever was, but my impending marriage is courting some column inches. I sort of got promoted from the first division of celebs to the premier league. I'm not all that attractive to look at - the Judge Jules's and the Pete Tong's get a lot more attention because they're sort of pin-up material. To be honest, I've always deliberately kept a low sort of a profile, and you can do that with dance music because you don't have to appear in your videos and no one really has to know what you look like. But unfortunately, by going out with Zoe, I've had to sacrifice that. But it's not a big sacrifice to make," he adds, "because the fringe benefits are marvellous."
When Norman first met Zoe, their eyes didn't quite meet across a crowded dance-floor, but it almost happened that way. The pair met in Ibiza last year when Cook was playing a club date, and Ball was broadcasting her radio show live from the Balearic island.
"She'd been trying to get me on her show, but it was a breakfast show, and I just don't get up that early, but when we were in Ibiza, we reckoned I could do it because I'd still be up from the night before. So I said to her, look, I'm not going to bed, so d'you fancy not going to bed with me? Which is probably quite a good chat-up line! So we did the show in a drunken haze, and then over the next couple of months she was always there every time I was playing, so eventually we got together. I didn't realise she was kind of chasing me, and every time someone said `I think that Zoe Ball kind of fancies you', I'd go `naaah, what - me? Are you joking?' It took a little while to believe it."
If anyone had told Norman Cook a few years ago that he would become the biggest DJ in Christendom, he probably wouldn't have believed that, either. Now that he's come all this way, however, he doesn't seem all that nonplussed. How does he explain his success - is it the timing, is it the tunes, or is it the Big Beat formula?
"I think it's several things - one thing is, I've been doing this for 14 years now, plugging away. Another is that my taste in music is a little bit more accessible, you know, I like a nice tune and a hookline and a chorus, and I'm not deliberately moody. And then another thing was, yeah, that whole kind of Big Beat thing, which people like Tom and Ed (aka The Chemical Brothers) and Jon Carter started. I was just around at the right time. And also, I think, after 14 years, I hear a commercial formula that works."
The formula works so well, in fact, that having the Fatboy Slim name on your sleeve credits can almost guarantee you a hit. Demand for Cook's remixing services was so brisk that he ended up turning down major artists such as U2 and Madonna. Now Cook has even less time to do remixes, because public demand for Fatboy Slim means that he's kept busy performing gigs and festivals around the world. He has just performed a massive "battle of the DJs" with Armand Van Helden in Brixton Academy, and in three weeks' time he's off to the US to perform in, of all places, Woodstock.
Amazingly, Cook has still found time to collaborate with his pal, Freddie Fresh, on the recent Badder Badder Schwing single. Surely, however, a return to regular DJ-ing at the Big Beat Boutique in Brighton, which Cook helped to found, is now out of the question? For one thing, they couldn't afford him any more.
"Not at all. I still play there - I'm supposed to be the resident, and basically the rule is that I play there whenever I'm in Brighton." ???????????e lives in London."
With his current album now in the Billboard Charts, Americans are cottoning onto this strangely-monickered phenomenon from the south of England. America's chat-show circuit has also beckoned the Brighton boy - he's currently considering an offer to appear on the David Letterman Show.
Fatboy Slim may be a big success, but Cook is cautious about turning his turntable skills into tacky show-biz. For the Battle Of The DJs gig, Cook and Van Helden wore boxing costumes and performed inside a revolving boxing ring. Tonight's gig at the Point - which will also be attended by the entire Manchester United team, in town for tomorrow's wedding between Posh Spice and David Beckham - will also sport the revolving boxing ring, four giant video "scoreboards", 350 lights, plus the biggest sound system ever installed in the venue. There'll be enough wattage to run the Financial Services Centre, and the big beats will pump out in full, glorious quadraphonic sound. All this artillery for just one guy and his two turntables.
`I'm quite aware that what I do is just play records. I saw a review of Glastonbury where it said that everyone was going ape-shit, and all they were looking at was a gangly, 35-year-old man playing records and occasionally waving his arms around in the air. And I thought, well, actually, they've got a point. So, I don't really want to take it any bigger than that, I'm quite happy at that level. If we can put a bit of production and show-biz into it, then that's quite nice, but it's not like rock bands where you end up with the lead guitarist swinging around the room on a harness."
Would Cook be tempted to recruit musicians and singers and turn Fatboy Slim into a band, just like Mike Pickering did with M People? After all, he has the background, having already played bass with The Housemartins in the 1980s.
"Nah, can't be arsed, really, to be honest!" is the short reply. "It would be too much effort. Camille Yarborough, who sang the original vocal on Praise You, asked if she could come and sing it live at Woodstock, and so we might do that. But I spent 10 years playing in bands, and DJ-ing is so much easier. I wouldn't go back to all that, rehearsals and everything. My recurring nightmare is the eternal soundcheck. When I play a DJ set I usually turn up about 10 minutes before the show. I stay in the bar until then!"
After Woodstock, Cook will play festivals at T In The Park and Rosskilde, but the event he's really looking forward to is his wedding day, on August 21st. The ceremony will be in a hotel outside Glastonbury, and the guest list will include DJs, rock stars and Radio 1 jocks. The pair plan to spend their honeymoon at a secret location "cos the last time we went on holiday, we got followed, and there were pictures taken of Zoe topless, so we've got a cunning plan, and we hope there won't be any pictures, because it kind of takes the fun out of your holiday when we can't do silly, naked, li-lo fighting and things."
Fatboy Slim plays the Point tonight
