Fatboy Slim

It is likely some will ask – Who really needs another Fatboy Slim album? And why has Norman Cook, the ultimate master of a thousand disguises, decided to make a fourth album – his first ever – under the same moniker?

One listen to the mighty Palookaville will quickly dispel such concerns. Because the answer is so simple: Everybody needs a new Fatboy Slim album.

Besides, if dance music is dead, someone forgot to tell Fatboy Slim. The million or more people who have been to his gigs in the past two years haven’t noticed either. In fact, in a career that dates back almost a decade, Fatboy Slim has never been bigger. When he threw his second Big Beach Boutique in his hometown of Brighton England two summers ago, 250,000 turned up to party – a crowd twice the size of the UK’s Glastonbury Festival. Another Big Beach bash in Rio in March this year drew Fatboy’s biggest ever single audience – a staggering 360,000 Brazilians. Fatboy’s DJ diary has never been busier.

But while it would be easy for Norman Cook to rest on his superstar DJ status, his passion for making music remains as strong as his passion for playing it. It has been four years since the last Fatboy Slim album, the two million-selling Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars, a record that topped charts all over the world and took more than 12 months to tour. Cook always planned on taking a break before recording its follow-up, Palookaville. “What’s Palookaville? Palookaville is a mythical, nonsense destination coined by Marlon Brando,” explains Cook. But what he didn’t know was that by the time he returned to the studio last year to begin work on Palookaville, the Fatboy Slim sound would have undergone a transformation. Rather than the sample based songs that first made Fatboy famous, Cook decided he wanted to work with with real musicians.

“My biggest inspiration was probably the time I spent with Blur,” says Cook, who last year produced two tracks for the band’s critically acclaimed Think Tank album. “In the past, I’ve been used to working alone in the studio, slaving over a hot computer, trying to make music that had a human feel. Being around Blur reminded me that sometimes, all you need is humans. It’s a lot quicker and a lot more fun and because you can bounce ideas around, you end up a sum of parts that is greater than what you could have achieved on your own. So I guess that was the gateway to Palookaville.”

For Cook, it was the first time he had made a real distinction between Fatboy the DJ and Fatboy the artist. As Palookaville began to take shape, the plan wasn’t just to work with other people, but to fully collaborate, using real instruments instead of samples and write more traditionally-structured songs. They would still be set to dance rhythms, but this time, they would have verses, choruses, bridges and middle eights. Plus, they would have Cook playing bass guitar – in fact, the same one he had when he was in The Housemartins!

The first song completed last autumn was “Long Way From Home”, collaboration with new, Brighton-based band Jonny Quality. “They sound like The Stray Cats having sex with the Beastie Boys with the Jam watching,” says Cook. “They sent me a demo, I went to see them play and loved them, so I gave them a backing track I had and asked them to help write a song over it. That turned out to be the key for the whole album. It’s a proper song with verses and choruses, backing vocals and guitars. In fact, it was the first time there had ever been a real instrument on a Fatboy Slim song.”

The same week, Cook invited his old friend Justin Robertson down to his studio to work on the track that would become “Push And Shove”. Both played guitar, Robertson sang what Cook describes as “a Manchester-style vocal, like Stone Roses or Happy Mondays”. The result is one of the album’s standout moments, rocking out with a sing-a-long chorus and even a blast of harmonica. “Before, I’d just do chorus, chorus, chorus, breakdown, chorus, chorus, bigger breakdown, but I was bored of all that. “Push And Shove” still has a dance element to it, but it sounds like a real band playing real music.”

From there on, Cook was confident enough to push the Fatboy sound in different directions. He flew rapper Lateef from Latyrx and DJ Shadow’s Quannum Collective over from San Francisco to guest on two tracks – “Wonderful Night”, which sets an hypnotic Lateef rap (and lyrics about mingers, supermodels and Dave Beckham) to the album’s funkiest tune, and cowboy-rap track “The Journey”, boasting what may be the world’s first rap in 3/4 time. “Lateef was the only rapper I could think of that could have pulled that off,” says Cook.

There were two further collaborations to come. The first single, which is a cover of The Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” with old Fatboy cohort Bootsy Collins and “Put It Back Together”, featuring Damon Albarn, a song begun at a drunken wrap party for Think Tank in Devon. “We finished it later in Brighton, when he flew over from Spain between dates with Blur. He was knackered, poor guy, and he actually fell asleep with his head on the desk. We’d wake him up, get him to sing another part in a certain way, then he’d fall asleep again. That’s the sign of a real pro!”

While there may be a growing gap between Fatboy Slim the DJ and Fatboy Slim the recording artist, they still rub shoulders and before completing the album, there were a couple of traditions Cook didn’t want to dispense with. So on Palookaville, you’ll also find the smoky, soulful “North West Three”, a song for his wife Zoe, with a lyric about Primrose Hill, where the pair used to walk when they lived in London. There’s also “Jin Go Lo Ba”, a frantic, dancefloor-friendly number Cook can slot into his DJ sets on his upcoming tours of Japan (September), UK (October) and the US (November) and “Slash Dot Dash”, a halfway house between old and new Fatboy with huge guitars, a chopped up vocal and bags of attitude.

“The title,” notes Cook, a computer luddite, “is just a comment on this new language people seem to have. I don’t understand it myself, but then I don’t even own a computer. Well, I do, the Atari in my studio, but no one ever sent me an email on that.”

In the end, Norman Cook is a blue-collar guy having a laugh at the establishment’s expense. One of us – a guy who still looks you in the eye when he speaks to you – who still believes that music can save your soul, redeem your love and shake your ass.

And when you take that passion and belief and put it to work with an inimitable talent for writing songs – songs that make you grin like you’ve just ingested a fistful of Class A’s – the result is the first truly important record of 2004. Just in time, Fatboy runs into the burning building and saves the day.

Which is as it’s always been. Is it a dance record? A pop record? Is it chilled out? Nope – never that – more like chilled UP. Yes, that’s it – the world’s first “chill-up” record.

Welcome to Palookaville. Enjoy your stay.