[ April 21, 1999 ]
Future: Fatboy Slim Profile
Future Music
Fatboy Slim Profile
Apr 21, 1999
The Mighty Dub Katz, Fatboy Slim, Pizzaman. He's also 50% of Freakpower and he was Beats International. But now and then, as Dave Robinson found, he's Norman Cook...
Norman Cook is lazy. But don't take my word for it. This is how he recalls making Sex On The Streets, his minor 1994 hit under the guise of Pizzaman. The record features an unnamed actor mimicking a George Bush-style President, ranting about society's lack of moral standards, while pumped-up house beats thunder away beneath.
"That speech was done live from the turntable. The rest of the track was live, off the sequencer, and I couldn't be bothered to stripe the ADAT. I had to sit there and bring the record in at the right time - I was too lazy to stripe the tape for 45 minutes."
But of course, this couldn't be further from the truth. You're looking at the guy who's currently recording under three different names: as funk revivalists Freakpower, as salsa swingbeat-masters Mighty Dub Katz, and recently as tripno terrorist Fatboy Slim. He's recorded previously under at least as many others, including The Feelgood Factor, the aforementioned Pizzaman and Beats International, scoring a massive Number One in February 1990 with Dub Be Good To Me. This is the guy who gets up at midday, only because he's burning the studio oil until three every morning. He's reluctant to produce a full discography, because, including his remixes, he reckons it would stretch to 300 entries.
"I have a philosophy of doing as much as possible. To do a good tune, I have to do nine crap ones. It's about quantity, not quality." So since leaving bouncy-pop ironists The Housemartins in 1988 - Norman was bass player - lazy is one thing he ain't.
Cook's menu -- We asked Norm for any words of advice for budding Fatboys:
"Do it at home, get a rudimentary home set-up so you can experiment. That's the only way to make interesting music - you have to break a lot of eggs before you can make the omelette. And you don't need the latest gear - I use an Akai S950, because I've never been bothered to learn how anything else works, but also it does everything I've ever needed. I don't need an S3000. Just simple gear and knowing what you can do with it. Go to a record fair, find a 50p bin and look for things between 1968 and 1975. If they're dressed in wild clothes, it's normally pretty good."
Becoming an acclaimed and prolific dance music producer was the last thing on Norman's mind when he was bopping along to Happy Hour in 1986.
"I was always into rap and funk and black music, but looking at Simply Red I thought, yeah, suburban white kids shouldn't try to make black music," says Norman, as we sit in his Brighton basement among his large collection of acid-house smileys.
When the Housemartins appeared in a TV documentary, Norm was shown cutting up breaks on turntables. "I had no understanding of technology, and I still have no affinity with it now," he readily admits. But what he did possess was an intuitive grasp of what needed to be done.
"I had a mate who worked at Chrysalis. He said: 'What would you do with this Eric B and Rakim record?'. I was trying to explain to him - 'cos nobody new about remixes at the time - if you had the a cappella, you could do a remix. So I demo'd it up on a four-track; he said, 'Brilliant!' and put me in a studio with Danny D."
This was 1988, just before Danny's D-Mob took acid house into the mainstream, with the sugary We Call it Acieed. "Danny taught me a lot. When we started, we didn't have a sampler, so we used to re-trigger things off a Bel delay. In those days it was quite exciting, because they hadn't invented all the stuff that's around to do things for you, you had to work things out for yourself.
At that time, Norman was using a Roland's TR-808 and JX-3P plus a four-track. No sequencer - not until the Roland MSQ-700, which he still has.
"My first sampler was a Roland S-10. When the sampler came out, you didn't have to fake an American accent or slap your bass, pretending to be black. You just looped things up and nicked other people's beats, basically."
By then, he wanted to do his own tunes, hence the arrival of Beats International: "Beats was me and whoever I was working with at the time. We had a stable-ish bunch of people, but it wasn't John, Paul, George and Ringo. That got unmanageable, and I went a bit bonkers around that time, so Beats fell apart. I went off for a couple of years, didn't do any work... went and found myself..."
Having found whatever bits were lost, Norm started Freakpower with Ashley Slater, a nutter trombonist who used to be in a Californian outfit called Microgroove. Ashley's brass section had already toured and played extensively with Beats. Freakpower released the Timothy Leary-abridgement Turn On, Tune in, Cop Out, a tune made infamous by the Levi's transvestite-in-the-cab ad.
"Around the time I was doing that," Norman explains, "I started doing a couple of house tunes. Loaded, a label in Brighton, put out Pizzaman, and that all took off. Then I wanted to make some tunes for a laugh, so I did the Mighty Dub Katz on Southern Fried which is my label, and that all took off. So then I did Fatboy Slim on Skint, which is a part of Loaded, and now that's taking off, as well!
"Freakpower has still not taken off, which is a shame," he says, with regret, "'cos that's the one I've worked the hardest on. Probably for that reason, it's not done quite so well. The more intellectual I get, the more it loses that spontaneity. All the successful tunes, all the number ones, I did for a laugh one afternoon. Dub Be Good To Me took eight hours to record and mix. Not that I'm saying everybody should work like that..."
[ missing 2 pages ]
He doesn't use 'em, but he did make one: Skip To My Loops was his early contribution to the library, back in the days before the boom in sample CDs.
"I must confess, I did that for the money. I'd had a messy divorce and was really skint. I wish I hadn't - three years of collected samples all given away."
He's generated much more material since. In fact, Norman has produced so much of everything since, he really is the epitome of workaholism. And so to the current project, the "no-nonsense pogo music" of Fatboy Slim. It smacks of the Chemical Brothers and Death In Vegas - how would he describe it?
"Big beat music, but you can call it Brit hop, amyl house, tripno, West Coast breakbeat techno... Up tempo, heavy breaks and a lot of noise."
The whole Fatboy slant came from "doing some nutty, funky stuff". Through Lindy Layton, ex-Beats lead singer, he met the likes of DJ Jon Carter and The Chemicals. It turned out that Fatboy Slim's Santa Cruz was already a club anthem there.
The key to the big beat sound, to those deadly 303 lines and pile-driver loops, is overdrive. "Blowing it up at the top of the channel for that gnarly, Hardfloor sound," as Norman puts it. "The Chemicals and me, we use a lot of guitar pedals - I use an envelope filter, called the Meatball. Sometimes you get clipping, but often you get an excellent noise."
And just when we are convinced this man hasn't got time to be lazy, a chink appears in his armour.
"The Chemicals said they put stuff through guitar amps and mic them up, which is quite serious. It must take a good 15 minutes to set up..."
Discography:MC Wildski
Norman Cook
Beats International
Beats International
Beats International
Beats International
Beats International
Shinehead
David Grant
Lindy Layton
Jon Pleased Wimmin
Heatwave
Freakpower
Freakpower
Freakpower
Freakpower
Pizzaman
Pizzaman
Pizzaman
Fatboy Slim
Fatboy Slim
Fatboy Slim
Mighty Dub Katz
Mighty Dub Katz
Mighty Dub Katz
Feel Good Factor
Chemistry
Duke | Wonderful World
Blame It On The Bassline
Dub Be Good To Me
Won't Talk About It
Burundi Blues
Echo Chamber
In The Ghetto
Let 'Em In
Hurt
Wait For Love
Passion
Ain't No Half-Steppin'
Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out
Get In Touch
New Direction
Can You Feel It
Trippin' On Sunshine
Sex On The Streets
Happiness
Santa Cruz
Punk To Funk
Everybody Loves a 303
Magic Carpet Ride
It's Just A Groove
Cangica
Fonk Train
Let Love Rule
So In Love With You
| Arista
Go! Discs
Go! Discs
Go! Discs
Go! Discs
Go! Discs
Go! Discs
Elektra
InDisc
Arista
Southern Fried/Perfecto
Ronco
Island
Island
Island
Island
Loaded
Loaded
Loaded
Skint
Skint
Skint
Southern Fried
S Fried/ffrr
Southern Fried
Southern Fried
Southern Fried
Southern Fried |
Albums:
Beats International
Beats International
Lindy Layton
Shinehead
David Grant
Freakpower
Freakpower
Fried Funk Food
Fried Funk Food
Pizzaman
Fatboy Slim
Mighty Dub Katz | Let Then Eat Bingo
Excursion On The Version
Pressure (tracks)
Sidewalk University (tracks)
Anxious Edge (tracks)
Drive Thru Booty
More Of Everything For Everybody
In Dub
Vol 2: The Real Shit
Pizzamania
Better Living Though Chemistry
The People Versus... | Go! Discs
Go! Discs
Arista
Elektra
Island
Island
Island
Island
Blunted Vinyl
Loaded
Skint
ffrr (imminent) |
Delores / Link to Here
|
