FATBOY SLIM

Short Order Cook
Fatboy Slim Wanted To Craft Another Record For Party People,
Yet Draw On Some Long-Forgotten Talents To Get There.
Welcome to Palookaville.

By Brian O’Connor
Photos by Rahav Segev
Published in the November 2004 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 17 - Number 11


I’d never imagined Fatboy Slim in such distress.

We’re sitting atop New York’s Gansevoort Hotel on a steamy August day, two lobsters in bisque, in heat that feels like the rear of a city bus exhaling on us. It’s noon and we’re lounge-chairing it, poolside, among a half-dozen bronzed European vacationers. Fatboy’s face is beet-like and he’s sweating, despite his shorts, flip-flops and open shirt, like a triathlete. Before we begin our chat, he politely excuses himself to kneel down, grab the
outer lip of the pool and dunk his head in the deep end.

It’s funny how Fatboy Slim seems like a fish out of water when he’s in the water. But he does. To a man whose every career achievement has occurred in the p.m., this, a slate of interviews in the daylight, must feel like a pig roast at a spa—and he’s the main course.
“That’s better,” he says, returning to his chair. He extends his soccer-goalie legs and begins speaking rapidly. As the sweat returns to his forehead, he eyes a water fountain in the patio corner and springs toward it. He pushes the metal button with his thumb and a stream of water arcs before him. And then everyone on the roof deck was treated to the sound of Fatboy Slim in distress.

“Aaarrgghhh! This f&*#@ fountain water is hot!!”

Since sunrise, the stainless steel fountain has been soaking up the sun’s heat for hours, which is splendid if you’re making tea. Shaking his head in disbelief, Fatboy returns to his chair and resumes chattering. Weird being the Posh and Becks of acid house, he says, wife left him but the boy was too young to know the difference, he adds, wish he could drive like James Bond…As he race-talks, it dawns on me: It’s pretty hot out here, sure, but something else has been heating up Fatboy Slim’s internal thermometer. I’ll bet anything he’s only recently returned from Palookaville.

Of course, as Fatboy Slim tells it, Palookaville is a state of mind, like nirvana, best achieved after consuming an inebriate of choice. But for our purposes, it’s simply the name of his first album in four years. Although the record is more an armchair-filler than a dancefloor shaker (he’s married with a kid, and he’s stopped smoking, after all), it doesn’t mean Fatboy has compromised on his youthful, err, indulgences.

Yet Palookaville (Astralwerks) does represent a maturation in his old-school, Atari ST creative approach: For the first time he mixed everything down in ProTools; he also used live guitars and he himself picked up the bass on several tracks—the first time he’s played bass on a record since he was merely Norman Cook, with the Housemartins, in 1988.

The results remain unmistakably Fatboy: His us versus them spirit, preened on acid house, is undiminished. A break-beat hippie jam, “Don’t Let the Man,” kicks the record off with a looped vocal from Five Man Electrical Band’s “Signs”: “Long-haired freaky people need not apply.”

Only on the looped blues of “Masochistic Baby” does he betray any pathos—he wrote it weeks before his wife, famed U.K. TV personality Zoe Ball, left him (yes, she returned).

But the role Fatboy truly relishes is that of a Pie-Eyed Piper of Party, a characteristic that surfaces continually, as on the buoyantly rolling “Wonderful Night,” the “la-la” anti-rat race theme of “Push and Shove,” and, especially, the first single “The Joker,” ostensibly a cover of the Steve Miller classic, with Bootsy Collins on vocals. There’s a little of the space cowboy, the joker, smoker, sinner and midnight toker in all of us, Fatboy suggests, and he’ll play his music in the sun, but what happens in Palookaville, stays in Palookaville. Our conversation went something like this.

DJ Times: Since the last record, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, have you been closer to the gutter, or to the stars?
Fatboy Slim: Uh, I’m still about halfway, I think. I added a tabloid thing into the equation since my last sweep of the States, though. It’s been quite a lot of column inches. Me and my wife, I guess we’re the Posh and Becks of the Acid House generation. They’re the No. 1 celebrity couple and I suppose we’re the No. 3 celebrity couple in England. We had a few marital problems, and a bit of a scandal, so I spent about six months trying to avoid being on the front page of all the tabloids.

DJ Times: How does Fatboy Slim go about avoiding the limelight?
Fatboy Slim: Don’t leave the house. And if you do leave the house, you have to shake off two cars of journalists and photographers. Every time I went out and didn’t want to have my picture taken I would have to be a James Bond driver.

DJ Times: What about when you’d go shopping, or to the pub?
Fatboy Slim: They’d print pictures of me loading my groceries in the car, and that would make Page 3.

DJ Times: So they wanted to see if Norman Cook was trying to destroy himself in the wake of his separation from Zoe Ball, the wildly popular TV/radio personality.
Fatboy Slim: Yeah, and is he seeing anyone else? We didn’t talk about it, so no one knows the why or when, but all they knew was that we had separated. We were only separated for about two months, but it went on and on, and it was nasty stuff. Now we’re fine, I was amazed at the, “Who was doing what? Who was doing who?” And ever since then we’ve been public property in England, which is quite weird, and that kind of held the album back a bit. I didn’t want to court publicity. I was quite happy to sit in the studio.

DJ Times: You sat in the studio and did remixes?
Fatboy Slim: I did a lot of remixes, worked on the album, played with my son. He’s three-and-a-half. This all happened when he was two, so he had no idea what was going on.

DJ Times: Not a bad way to sell records.
Fatboy Slim: It has sort of kept me in the public eye, if you believe the old adage, all press is good press. Even though it’s been four years since the last record, no one’s forgotten about me. I’ve been DJing all through that time. Some people have careers as DJs and they don’t make records. I disappeared for about a year while I was making the record, but two years before that I was still DJing. I did an enormous party at Brighton Beach—a quarter-million people in a city that doubled its size.

DJ Times: That Brighton gig generated its own controversy, didn’t it?
Fatboy Slim: It was a Saturday gig, and everybody got there early on Saturday morning, drank all afternoon in the sunshine on the beach. We didn’t have enough toilets, everybody was pissing in the street. We trashed the town, basically. The whole town turned into a party, and the rubbish, there was 68 tons of rubbish, which took a couple days to clear up. I had to pay extra for cleanup—I think it was £50,000, on top of what we had previously arranged.

DJ Times: That’s a lot of rubbish.
Fatboy Slim: Yeah, broken glass on the beach. Brighton is a pebble beach, and we had to pay people literally to go through with their hands picking broken glass out of the beach. The whole town stank of piss for about two weeks. I was praying for rain to wash away the piss. I made myself quite unpopular with a few people. Even though the city council really wanted me to do it—I did it two years running. The first one was such a success that everybody told their mates and they told their mates, and people were coming down from Scotland for it. But the council wanted me to do it because it brought a lot of money into the town. Put us on the map. Everyone called it Normstock. We took last year off, and we were going to do it again this year, but the police made it so difficult. The last time, we were minutes away from tragedy. They said we were one crush away from 200 people being killed. And because it’s on the beach, everyone would have been coming down the hill from the train station and pushed everybody into the sea. We were going to fence it in—still be free—but limit the numbers to 250,000 people. Tickets would have been free and it would have required a Brighton postcard in order to get in. It would have been mainly for Brighton people—which would have solved the traffic problem. The police would have charged me a £250,000 in overtime, and if anything went wrong I would have been run out of town.

DJ Times: The police were afraid of a repeat of last time.
Fatboy Slim: At the last one, a girl died—not at the gig, but four hours afterward. She fell off the top of a promenade. She was fucked up. But a lot of the newspapers inferred that I was somehow responsible for her death, which was really upsetting. In the end, her parents wrote to me and said, “Look, the papers have got it all wrong. It could have happened at any time. She had just rung us up on the phone saying she was having the time of her life. Thanks for making her last night the night of her life. She was drunk and she fell off a roof. She just happened to be at your gig.” If anything happened like that again I’d be run out of town.

DJ Times: How do you program a set for 250,000 people?
Fatboy Slim: By the time I got up to the console, I was so rattled. The police tried to stop the gig. They told me it was too dangerous, there were too many people. I said, “Yeah, but if I don’t play you’ll have a riot on your hands. They’re here to party. Where are they going to go? They’re not going to turn around and go home just because you pulled the plug on the music.” He agreed. I was looking at the crowd to see if there was any pushing going on.

DJ Times: So did you play down-tempo?
Fatboy Slim: No, I went for it. It’s funny, because we released a DVD of it, and you can actually see on my face, I’m scared. I’m scared that all of a sudden I’m going to be watching people dying in front of me—especially because there were all these drunk people near the sea. It was quite a sight to behold. It went out live on the TV as well, with cranes and stuff, £5,000 worth of fireworks. We learned a lot from that. We did it again in Rio last February where we got 350,000 people. It was the weekend after Carnival, and it was a bigger, sandier, flatter beach, and we had 3,500 security people, including a 50-man SWAT team. They did TV advertising that cost them 2.5 million to put on. They want to do it again, in Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela, and we’ve been asked to do it on a big beach in Melbourne—it’s called Brighton Beach. Next summer I’m just going to spend my time touring the beaches of the world.

DJ Times: Did you drop any Duran Duran during the Rio gig?
Fatboy Slim: I did. I did. I made a special tune based around that. Ugly Duckling [sings] “Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro,” and I made a kind of acid sandwich tune to start with and halfway through it drops down to [sings], “Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand.”

DJ Times: Where is Palookaville?
Fatboy Slim: I visit every other weekend. No one lives there. You wouldn’t want to live there. It’s a nice place to visit. It’s
a mythical destination, like nirvana. When I let myself go on weekends, I get a one-way ticket to Palookaville—
Looneysville, really.

DJ Times: Would “Masochistic Baby” be the autobiographical track?
Fatboy Slim: It’s quite weird, because I actually wrote that before my wife left me. It was quite weirdly prophetic. And then when she came back, I said, “Should I not put that song on the album?” She said, “No, it’s hilarious. Your masochistic baby did leave you.”

DJ Times: Any clearance nightmares with Steve Miller for “The Joker”?
Fatboy Slim: If you do a straight cover you don’t have to ask permission—as long as you don’t change the integrity of the lyrics. We funked it up a bit, but we still remained faithful to the original. I can’t see Steve Miller having any problems with it. He gets the publishing royalties anyway.

DJ Times: Last time we spoke, you were using the Akai S950 and an Atari ST in the studio. It kinda re-defines old-school.
Fatboy Slim: Still am. I’m still using them for the writing and the arranging process, but then we put it all in Pro Tools.
I finally succumbed.

DJ Times: Who convinced you to do that?
Fatboy Slim: My engineer. All the stuff he does for himself and other people, that’s how he works. So he told me that his job would be so much easier if we worked in ProTools. I still work on the Atari. It’s much quicker, because you get total recall. It probably saved us two or three weeks in the mixing process.

DJ Times: You don’t have a problem finding monitors for the old Atari ST?
Fatboy Slim: Monitors are a problem. I’ve got like six STs—they only cost like 40 bucks. So if one breaks, I just move on to the next one. But monitors are a problem, and I’m down to my last one. If this one goes, I’m cooked. I might have to figure out how to patch to another monitor. I’ll just have to scour junk shops—and maybe one day I’ll upgrade. But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Usually, I just do the entire thing on my Atari and call in Simon [Thornton] to mix it down. Now, he’s more involved in the creative process. He’s been promoted from engineer to executive producer because he has much input. And that’s quite nice, cause normally I’ll just be sitting there, talking to myself, “Can I do that better?” And now I’ve got someone to bounce ideas off during the creative process. Or he’ll just do something on ProTools and he’ll be like, “What do you think of this?”

DJ Times: And you worked with musicians?
Fatboy Slim: Guitarists, and I play some bass on some of the tracks. I’ve never had any live instruments on a Fatboy Slim record before. A couple time I looped myself up instead of sitting there and playing all the way through. I haven’t played bass on a record since 1988.

DJ Times: What prompted you to pick up the bass again?
Fatboy Slim: I worked with a band called Johnny Quality on one of the tracks, and they came up with this tremolo guitar thing. Once we had one live instrument on the album, I figured, why not? Rather than spend hours trying to find a guitar sample I could chop up. Once we broke our cherry on it, it was really like, why not?

DJ Times: Did you use live drums as well?
Fatboy Slim: We haven’t gone that far. I’m quite good at chopping up breaks and making them sound like live.
I kind of enjoy it as well.

DJ Times: Would you say that’s your strength in the studio?
Fatboy Slim: No, I think my biggest strength is having an ear for a catchy chorus, an ear for a hook, whether it’s a sample or whether I’m working with a singer. They’ll scat a lot of stuff and I’ll sit there and say, “That should be a chorus; that should be a bridge; let’s work on that; that melody I really like.” It’s ears, which is great for being a DJ as well. I get sent about eight records a day, and I spend a fair amount of my week listening to records. I’ve got quite a good track record of what songs are going to go over well in the club.

DJ Times: How did you choose vocalists on the record?
Fatboy Slim: Some of them chose me. Damon [Albarn] I had produced about one-third of the last Blur album. After we finished the last mix, we had a party, and during some drunken cavorting Damon asked me how my album was going. I told him I had some ideas, so I put it on in the studio and he started singing over it. We got the mic out real quick and got it down. He just scatted along with it, so I took it home and re-arranged it. Bootsy Collins, I had worked with on the last album, and I’d produced him. I sent him a rhythm track. Johnny Quality is a local Brighton band and I was looking for someone to do a vocal track for a track that I’d done for an advert for a phone company in England—the advert was really popular, but no one knew it was me. So, I decided to put it on the album, and asked them to play on it.

DJ Times: Does beer help the creative process?
Fatboy Slim: Vodka. I never go in the studio before six—there are too many distractions, and I don’t feel creative during the day. On work days I get up about 11 or 12, spend the afternoon on the phone, sorting our business, listening to records, put my son to bed at about half-7, and then go into the studio about 8, and then work until 4. If I’m working with a vocalist, I don’t normally drink, unless they need a drink. But when I’m writing, I find that Vodka helps, just because I’m a vodka drinker and it doesn’t give me a hangover.

DJ Times: Is there a point where you arrive at Vodka Overload?
Fatboy Slim: Some nights if I’m on a roll with a track I’ll work until 10
or 11 the next morning. Usually, though, by 4 or 5, I’ve had too much vodka and I just go next door and stumble into bed with my wife. It’s quite nice, actually.