Wednesday at lunchtime, and a restaurant on Hove’s boardwalk offers a drum’n ‘bass remix of Althea & Donna’s 1978 reggae hit, Uptown Top Ranking. You could name the volume that is ringing in the cutlery sonar if there are any cutlery in the restaurant to ring, but none. The service is suspended, the tables are pushed to one side, and in the center of the room, Norman Cook is teaching Jess and Amber, two women in their twenties, how to make a DJ: one-ear headphones so you can listen the song you are. activate while listening to the currently playing track with the other track. It is a task that he faces with great enthusiasm and an admirable lack of pretension: “They were a kind of ‘wow’ sound”, he shrugs, pointing to the buttons on the filter of the mixer, which is both very attractive and , for anyone who has followed Cook’s. the race as Fatboy Slim, not so surprising.
In the late 1990s, the era of superstar DJs, when some of his bandmates used to make mind-boggling statements: Paul Oakenfold justified his fees by pointing out that he not only played records, but also raised his hands and point out the people of The people smiled, and concluded: I am an animator; Cook regularly incurred his anger by refusing to take his job so seriously: “A monkey could do what I do,” was one of his most celebrated statements. He doesn’t say any of that today: “I think,” he smiles, “I was probably being a little overly modest when I said these things, because I had been a musician. [in the Housemartins] and all my musician friends were like, “but you only play records,” but he suggests to his students that the most important thing to remember about the mixer filter buttons is “make a face when you’re there.” turning them ”. “That’s mine,” he adds, leaning forward and pulling his head back in apparent ecstasy.
Music manipulation focuses on you. So it’s a joy to see people who have been struggling going through this process
Cook is here as part of a charity-funded NHS program to organize art events for people with severe mental health issues, which also includes singing workshops, samba classes and sound healing. “I wanted to make music accessible to everyone,” says Natalie Rowlands, a senior occupational therapist who scheduled the events, “to break the stigma around mental illness, to build trust in people, and to have music workshops. “A lot of class in really nice venues. A lot of people here have been musical in the past, but they’ve been through a lot of things, they’re coming out again and that gives them an incredible opportunity.”
“Natalie contacted me and I found it interesting,” Cook nods. “It’s kind of a life statement, it’s good for me to see people who have never touched a set of covers before going between two tracks and thinking, ‘Uh!’ Sometimes I can get a little insulted about what I do for a job and see this innocent joy in the way you can manipulate music – it’s exciting, it focuses you, it gives you a nice feeling of warmth, so it’s a joy to see people who have has been struggling through this process. “
Brighton shook … 250,000 fans flocked to the Big Beach Boutique in 2002. Photo: Everynight Images / Alamy
It seems a little surprising that Cook has time to get involved. At 58, and almost a quarter of a century after Fatboy Slim’s commercial rise as a record artist, his DJ agenda sounds exhausting: Switzerland, Poland, Glastonbury, France, Berlin. Two nights on Brighton Beach, celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Big Beach Boutique event, which legendary attracted 250,000 people and stopped the city: as a result, there was so much uproar that Cook later left the country on proposal. of his then-neighbor Paul McCartney. “It turned out that if you put all the people who go to the little nightclubs in one place, there were a lot of us,” he says. “This is limited to 7,500 people, they are in a corral on the beach and no glass is allowed on the site. It’s a Big Beach Boutique.”
It all comes as a big relief after what he calls an “interesting” blockade. “My job is to bring large numbers of people together and do everything we shouldn’t be doing. For the first few weeks, I thought, ‘What do I do?’
Like many DJs, he posted weekly mixes online, “which kept my mental health on track, and I had the free summer he had always promised me. Then, in the fall, my son went to college, my daughter went back to school, and the walls started to close a little. “
Eventually, he got a job serving at his coffee shop in Hove. “We had a case of Covid, we lost two-thirds of our staff, so it closed or stopped. I worked there for seven months. People were walking along the boardwalk because that’s the only thing that ‘ I was allowed to do it and it was where they had coffee at the end of the walk, so it looked like we were the last bastion of the community and the connection. to stay healthy, really. But it has been a pleasure to return. “
The return … Fatboy Slim plays Coachella 2022 last April. Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images for Coachella
In May 2021, he put on a maskless show in Liverpool as part of the government’s Event Research Program, to see if it was feasible to return to mass meetings. “It was just weird. There was something about” if this gets up, this could be stuffed for another six months. Our job was to try first and then go all-in and lick each other’s faces and get properly involved and see what happens, which we were all prepared to do. It was weird for the first two minutes and then … “He smiled.” It was the time when the clock struck 12 on New Year’s Eve, but all night. Just kissing strangers, hugging strangers because you can. The DJ is a two-way street, it’s a conversation, if you’re a DJ without an audience, for a live show or whatever, he’s just a middle-aged man playing records in his kitchen. three minutes, it was “why does my heart beat so fast? Oh, I’m excited, I’m excited to be here. I remember that feeling. “
Despite Covid, Cook’s DJ career seems to have progressed to a level full of arena, unaffected by changes in weather, tastes or, in fact, his decision to, more or less, stop make your own music. He told The Guardian in the early ’00s that if his records stopped selling, “he would seriously consider packing everything,” and he was true to his word after the 2004 Palookaville failed. platinum from previous Fatboy Slim albums. Her 2009 album, Brighton Port Authority, which came complete with countless star guests, including Iggy Pop and Dizzee Rascal, and a complex background story involving a fake band’s career, attracted few users. Since then, he has only released a handful of songs, although one of them, Eat Sleep Rave Repeat 2013, was a Top 3 hit that caused memes: variations of his title circulate online to this day. . “My enthusiasm for making records went down a bit. But my enthusiasm for DJing has never waned. And since I really enjoy it, it’s not just visits to the arena, I play in clubs all year round. It’s like the first week: the new intake is at the head of the clubs – there are kids who say ‘My parents played your records when I was little’, and since I’m playing at their local club below, they come to see me out of interest and … ”–he laughs–“ another soul is mine. ”
Family fun … Cooking with daughter Nelly at Bestival Camp in 2021. Photo: Dan Reid / Rex / Shutterstock
There are still clear signs of the passage of time, especially the fact that their children have started DJing. Her 10-year-old daughter Nelly performed on a live broadcast by Camp Bestival during the confinement: there was a fabulous moment when Cook tried to adjust something to the mixer and was kicked out. Her son Woody, meanwhile, is “right full-time – he did five gigs last week. He started DJing because his roommate was a DJ. Two months after he left home, ‘Now I will be DJ ‘. All these years in which I could have imparted my wisdom and he did not want to know! Last summer he played in Ibiza at the Mambo, and I was with him in the DJ booth. , he played Groove Armada’s At the River and I burst into tears! because there was chaos around me and me and Zoe [Ball, his ex-wife] never, never pushed him to any of them. But she has grown to love him and she has chosen him completely independently. “
So it looks like you have at least some of the participants in today’s workshop. I talk briefly with Jess, a 34-year-old drummer, who was in music school until her mental health “hit me hard.” She says she came at the suggestion of her support worker: “You can disappear into the nothingness of creativity, but you just have to hold on somehow and come out again.” He found the matching rhythms pretty easy and “genuinely loved it”: “It makes you want to follow it more and think, ‘I’m good enough, I exist in this world, I just haven’t had it.'”
Back at the restaurant, the sound of drum’n’bass still sounds. Another participant seems to have become accustomed to mixing completely, including the filter buttons. Cook takes a step back and looks. “Well, now there’s nothing else I can teach you,” he smiles and gives her a note.