He’s ditched the 36-hour benders. He’s selling the Brighton party pad. And his new album’s eased back on that cheery big beat Fatboy Slim sound. But Norman Cook is still held in god-like reverence by, well, everybody
Dom Phillips The first thing a very pregnant Zo Ball does when I walk into her kitchen is hold out her hand, smile and say: “Hi, I’m Zo.” Which is sweet, if unnecessary. She makes me a cup of coffee with Coffeemate they’re out of milk. If Posh and Becks, Britain’s other fashionable celebrity couple, are like a bad Australian soap opera something you watch in horror then Ball and Cook are Coronation Street: all “aaah” and “ooh” and soft centres. They are a reluctant celebrity couple, so it’s strange that they should want to hold the interview in their big white house on the Brighton seafront. And even stranger that they should forget the milk. But that’s the trouble with celebrity you end up miles from the shops.
They live among a reassuring amount of dust and clutter, and their kitchen windows open right on to a forbidding sea. The seething waves are close, and spray splashes the glass. Sometimes, Ball says happily, waves break right over the house. Cook bustles into the kitchen and the press officer asks if we’ve met. We have, but for a second Cook struggles to recall where. “Of course,” he says, grasping my hand. “He saved my life in ‘Nam.”
In an upstairs lounge the size of a tennis court, Cook chats about his new album, Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, recorded on a deadline to catch the lucrative pre-Christmas release slot. The baby is due on Christmas Eve, “so everyone decided I was on a curfew. Zo cracked the whip.”
Norman Cook has been quietly famous in all sorts of ways since the mid-Eighties, when he was playing bass in the Housemartins (whose singer Paul Heaton later found fame with The Beautiful South). He was guitarist with dance act Beats International, supplied the brains for the funk band Freak Power and had a string of dance hits under a host of aliases such as Mighty Dub Katz.
But his Fatboy Slim persona has been more successful than anything. His last album, 1998’s You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, mixed hard-nosed beats, riotous funk and oddball voices (“Right about now, the young soul brother,” insists one) and sold 4,5-million copies. There were no photos of Cook on the sleeve just an obese, grinning redneck whom many thought was “Fatboy Slim”.
The album won three MTV awards. But it was when he fell in love with TV presenter and latterly Radio 1 DJ Zo Ball that he was catapulted into the celebrity super-league. His extrovert personality helped: most DJs are stoic technicians who prefer to skulk behind the decks. Not Cook.
On one memorable night at the Brixton Academy he turned an encounter with New York DJ Armand van Helden into a pantomime boxing match. “Showboating,” he calls it. “Vaudeville.” Not since Tony Blackburn, the Hairy Cornflake and the vintage Radio 1 Roadshow has anyone made such a performance of playing the decks. Yet Cook has retained the respect of the DJ fraternity. “They never accuse me of selling out,” he says.
The sound popularised by Cook and friends like The Chemical Brothers became known as “big beat” and its retro cool and sense of fun dovetailed perfectly with the kitsch obsessions of the late Nineties. But stardom on this level didn’t agree with Cook. “I’m not built for the big time,” he says. “I just get really freaked out by it.” To prove it, he begins a story about clowning around backstage at the star-infested MTV awards. The story involves “me and Spike”, who, I slowly realise, is Spike Jonze, who directed his promo for Praise and appeared in it as Richard Kouffey, the imaginary leader of a charismatic Christian dance troupe. “Spike’s even more irreverent than me. He went up to Aerosmith and introduced himself as Richard Kouffey, Torrence Community Dance Group.” Even when Cook is poking fun at fame, he’s doing it with famous people.
Fatboy Slim’s new album has mostly replaced cheery big beat with the darker, more robotic house rhythms of his menacing Jim Morrison-sampling single Bird of Prey, and sleazy funk. “It’s definitely not as commercial an album as the last one so it probably won’t sell so well,” he says, sounding quite pleased at the prospect. There are some impressively funky songs, two of which feature soul singer Macy Gray. He’s replaced the feverish drum-roll excitement of previous Fatboy Slim albums with gospel samples and boogie-woogie blues piano and in the process found new ways of building the emotional peaks that define his music.
The album’s opener, Talking Bout My Baby, mixes a demented blues singer over a clanging piano and is apparently dedicated to Zo: “She got red hot pants on. She got on the yellow high-heel sneakers. She got on the yellow roll-neck, see-through blouse. She’s shakin’ like two big old balloons in a hurricane.”
He jokes that the album takes him back to his roots in the Philadelphia ghetto. In fact he grew up in Reigate, Surrey, where his Guardian-reading, liberal parents had christened him Quentin. Not surprisingly, he changed it. “Sharing a name with Britain’s most famous homosexual didn’t do me any favours going through school.” His folks, he says warmly, insisted their children call them by their first names. “So it was Ron and Roz,” he says, grinning. “They were cool. Middle class. Quite sort of bohemian, liberal, vegetarian types.”
When as a young punk he was caught shoplifting, his mother told him: “It’s my fault. I’ve let you down, it’s a cry for help.” His father introduced bottle-banks to Britain, which he helped publicise by dressing as a character called Ali Jam Jar. He won an MBE. There is a picture of him with Prince Charles on the mantelpiece.
Now 37, Cook is facing fatherhood for the first time. “After I met Zo, I kind of realised my career probably isn’t going to end while I’m still at child-having age. Or maybe it’s time to start winding down… I have to find a way of living out my latter years with some kind of dignity. I think you can do that, DJing and producing.”
Cook is in the same age group as the country’s biggest DJs. They all started the British dance scene together and pretty much still dominate it. Radio 1’s Pete Tong celebrated his 40th birthday this year. His Radio 1 team-mate Danny Rampling is 39. Paul Oakenfold, rated by the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful DJ in the world, is 36. Every weekend at clubs they entertain teenagers young enough to be their children.
A sobering thought that dawned on Norman Cook last year at Glastonbury, when he discovered one young fan who wanted to say hello was a friend’s daughter “who I last saw when she was 10. She’s 16, 17. All I could see was these tits with a tattoo on them. From this daughter of a friend of mine, you’re now down the front of a gig and you’ve got a tattoo.”
He shudders, the disco-ringmaster faced with his own mortality. “Me, Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong we are the old guard. Our careers or our health or whatever will all start waning in the next five years. Yeah, something will happen.”
Then we have a High Fidelity moment, as befits an encounter with a celebrity DJ. Like Nick Hornby’s hero, most DJs are obsessive cataloguers. We gently disagree about who did a certain record. “Shall we have a look?” says Cook, and leads me off into the studio off the lounge.
In here, the album was made with synthesisers and samples, by patching together bits and pieces from the mountains of obscure records in which Cook finds his trademark licks and voices. If Fatboy Slim lives anywhere, it’s in here, among the dusty old albums, the keyboards, the guitar hanging on the wall, a glamour shot of Zo from a men’s magazine. Cook finds the record in 15 seconds flat. I timed him.
When the couple got married last year and declined to sell their wedding photos to Hello! magazine, Norm-and-Zo-mania reached a crescendo. They were mobbed at Glastonbury. This year they spent three days at the festival roughing it in one of the backstage areas. You could occasionally hear children scream: “Dad! Dad! Zo Ball’s in that caravan!”
This low-key approach has earned them a goodwill that few celebrities achieve. “We are seen as kind of acceptable and nice, rather than arrogant and gobby,” he says. “We definitely keep each other in check. If one gets a bit arrogant or showbizzy, the other one says, ‘Come on, we don’t behave like that.'”
While it would be nice to believe in Norm and Zo’s anti-celebrity, no frills, oh-look, we’re-just-like-you routine, it doesn’t wash. Not when they’d just had Noel Gallagher and his new girlfriend, Sara McDonald, down for the weekend. “Well, she’s a good friend of Zo, that’s the connection. It was all very quiet. They’d come down here to get away from the publicity. I think he’s trying to get out of that whole Primrose Hill, Met Bar set… he just doesn’t want to run with that gang any more.”
So there’s a bit of a refuge here for besieged celebrities? “There are tons of people who find it difficult to stand around in clubs because they get bothered all the time so you do tend to mix with your own quite a lot. And also, Tom and Ed [The Chemical Brothers] are just about our best friends and they know Noel, so it’s kind of a… a little showbiz gang,” he says. “Sometimes only other people who live the same life really understand.”
Cook moved here from a terraced house in Brighton that he’d filled with hundreds of smiley faces (he still wears the acid-house logo on a ring). The house has been let to students “on the grounds that they kept the Tahiti bathroom and the AstroTurf and the Stringfellows Disco Toilet” but is now up for sale. If Cook can bear to sell it. When his Brighton club nights used to finish at 3am, 30-odd people would descend on the “House of Love” for parties that could go on for days. Gatecrashers would be welcomed with a drink. “Every one looked after the house. If anyone spilt anything, they’d get a cloth. Things like that. It was kind of an experiment in giving out unconditional love to strangers. That’s how it got its name, the House of Love. We thought we could avoid trouble just by loving everyone. And it kind of worked.” There’s a pause. “Sometimes I do miss the cosiness of it.”
He surveys his vast lounge. “And a different kind of partying. When we moved here, we were like, ‘You know what? We’re not going to invite everyone. We’ll just invite a select band.’ It’s obvious I’m not going to give it all up. But I’m becoming more aware of my responsibilities as an impending parent,” he says. “Thirty-six-hour benders are out now.”
This from the man who once famously snorted a line of cocaine from a railway line and who used to brag about his drug consumption in interviews.
He tells me a story about one family Christmas. “My mum had Mixmag [a clubbing magazine] with an article about me in it,” he says. “At the dinner table, my sister goes, ‘Why have they got a picture of a pill with the Mitsubishi logo on the front?’ And my mum goes, ‘It’s a new kind of ecstasy tablet that’s just come out, and it’s much more potent than the others, and it’s really popular right now.’ I said, ‘Mum, how do you know that?’ And she goes, ‘Because I read Mixmag. Because you’re always in it.'”