Hot Press meets Fatboy Slim

Forget David Guetta, Avicii, Skrillex, Calvin Harris, deadmau5 and those other (comparatively) young EDM whippersnappers. Summer 2013’s biggest fuck-off dance anthem, ‘Eat Sleep Rave Repeat’ has been conjured up by the turned-50-last-week Fatboy Slim and his fellow big beat survivor Stefano Miele, AKA Riva Starr. Like much of the Cook boy’s career, it’s all the result of a happy accident.

“I’ve kind of lost my erection for going into the studio, but myself and Stef were out early morning record shopping in Brooklyn and bumped into this random guy who was ranting about some three-day bender he’d been on… or was still on!” he laughs. “We simultaneously had the same thought – ‘Let’s record this bloke and chop him up into a tune!’ It was like the old days when you didn’t think, you just did.”
Was it “Stormin’ Norman!” again in the trouser department?
“I’m going to regret that erection analogy, aren’t I?”
Yes.
“Thought so! It was fun and the reaction from people has been fucking phenomenal. After making records for nearly a quarter-of-a-century, I feel I’ve been there, done that. Making tunes on a laptop doesn’t have that frontier edge of inventing ways to abuse samplers and drum-machines. You don’t feel like you’re breaking rules any more, you’re just pressing buttons. There’s still that genuine thrill though when you get an idea and think, ‘This will turn people on!’ What bullied me into finishing the tune was the way punters picked up on the vocal when I dropped it into my set. I thought, ‘Fuck me, that’s my ‘lager lager lager’!’”
It’s a sign of how monster a tune it is – and also the respect Fatboy Slim still commands within the dance community – that ‘Eat Sleep Rave Repeat’ has been given an even more Ibiza-friendly makeover by Calvin Harris.
“We were chatting one night about our mutual love of acid house and how one day we should make an acid house record together,” Cook reveals. “The next morning that turned into a discussion about how to make a slightly more commercial version of ‘Eat Sleep…’ Calvin wanted to shake off some of his pop sound and get back to being dirty again, so it ended up being ‘mission accomplished’ for both of us.”
‘Eat Sleep Rave Repeat’ won’t have pleased the architects of EDM for whom The First Commandment is, “Thou shalt not utter the carrying druggy connotations with it ‘R’-word!”
“In my circles, E-D-M quickly gets translated into T-E-D-I-U-M. If you mention those three letters together people will either switch off or sick up a little in their own mouth. I say, ‘Reclaim the rave!’ Maybe it took dressing it up as something else for the Americans to get it but for us it’s raving and it always will be.”
Nice one, top one, sorted to that! For all of its castrating of dance culture, EDM blowouts like New York’s Electric Zoo, Seattle’s Decibel and Miami’s Ultra, which Cook stormed last month, have certainly raised the bar in terms of festival bling.
“If you’d given Gatecrasher £10 million to do something 15 years ago, Ultra’s probably what they would have come up with. Production-wise it’s so OTT it’s unbelievable. The main stages are poptastic, but there’s always a Carl Cox Tent for the likes of me to hide away in. People come up to me afterwards and say, ‘That was great, it was so old school!’ And I’m like, ‘Thanks, but I wasn’t intending to be old school.’ I’ve just finished a huge run of 21 shows – EDM festivals included – and I have to say they’ve all been good fun.”
Is he aware that one of his all-time heroes, Giorgio Moroder, is DJ-ing alongside him at the Electric Picnic?
“No, I wasn’t! That could be absolutely amazing… or dreadful, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt! I will shake his hand and kiss his feet for what he’s done. Any future crimes are forgiven, he has his place in heaven.”
Also on the Stradbally bill is David Byrne, Cook’s co-conspirator on their 2010 concept album, Here Lies Love, about Filipino shoe fetishist Imelda Marcos. How did the somewhat unlikely hook up come about?
“I’d bumped into him over the years. I’d told him how much I dug what he did and he liked what I did. Then he just rang me one day and asked, ‘Do you fancy doing this?’ If anyone else in the world had suggested co-writing a musical on the life of Imelda Marcos to me I’d have told them ever so politely to: ‘Fuck off!’ but because it was David Byrne I thought, ‘He knows what he’s doing!’”
The seamless sound of the finished album belies the way it was assembled, “If I was in America I’d go and hang out in New York and if he was over in Europe he’d come to Brighton and get himself a stick of rock. We also did chunks of it via-post and on the internet, so every conceivable method was deployed! “David’s a fascinating man,” Norman continues. “He’s got this nervous, intellectual persona in interviews but when you meet the real man he’s just playful. He’s very bright, very imaginative and completely sideways but still knows what people like. David is one of the most inspirational people I’ve ever worked with.”
Also featuring the likes of Tori Amos, Steve Earle, Cyndi Lauper, Róisín Murphy, Santigold, Florence Welch and Martha Wainwright, the album didn’t exactly set the charts alight in 2010 but has gone on to spawn “a fully immersive, 360-degree theatrical experience” that will hopefully be crossing the Atlantic next year.
“Being David Byrne it’s very firmly off-Broadway, but it ran for most of the summer in The Public Theater in Manhattan and picked up a few awards. I think it’s going into a larger theatre that’s still off-Broadway but marginally less so, and then it’ll tour. Without giving too much away, it’s set in a nightclub; you’re on the dancefloor and all the action happens on podiums. It’s not going to match Cats or Les Mis in the bums on seats department but it’s a good night out.”
It must be nice after 34 years of music making – Cook’s first gig was playing drums with new wave also-rans Disque Attack – to still be doing new things.
“I’ve felt these past few years that we’ve made the shows as big as we possibly can – or perhaps want them to be,” he reflects. “Kudos to David Guetta and Skrillex for the phenomenal scale at which they’re operating. It’s not for me though. I’ve enjoyed going sideways and finding more weird and wacky things.”
The downscaling went out of the window last August when he accepted an invitation from Danny Boyle to appear at the Olympics Closing Ceremony.
“Yeah, that was about as massive as it gets but also, given that I was DJ-ing on top of a bus on a hydraulic platform surrounded by a neon octopus, quite a trip! Then there was playing in the House of Commons 19 years after it had passed the Criminal Justice Bill. I kind of feel the chickens are coming home to roost!”
All of which is of minor consequence compared to the live TV reveal of the new Doctor Who. With the missus Zoë Ball presenting, did Norman have prior insider knowledge of who it was going to be?
“No, they know Zoë’s got a big mouth – and that mine’s even bigger – so she wasn’t told until a couple of hours beforehand,” he grins. “Personally, I’d have given it to Idris Elba but, then again, he might make a better James Bond. I do think Peter Capaldi’s a great choice though and look forward to him nutting a few cybermen!”