The norman conquest

It’s backstage at Creamfields. The sun is streaming in through the window of Fatboy Slim’s dressing room and the biggest dance star on the planet is in pretty good form, all things considered. The man who 37 years ago was christened Norman Cook begins our interview by apologising for his current state of mind. He played at The Boutique the previous night and ended up with just four hours sleep, which he maintains is just about enough to function for the following 24 hours: “after two hours sleep you just feel like shit the next day but four hours is alright.”

Norman has been a busy man since last year saw the release of his third album as Fatboy Slim, Halfway Between The Gutter and the Stars. It’s not as if he embarked on a massive world tour or even engaged in a huge amount of promotional work for the album, though. Our Norm has been up to his eyes with matters much closer to home, namely the birth of his son, Woody. Certainly, not a case of too many Cooks…

Young Woody Cook is one of the most famous infants in the British Isles at the moment, seeing as his parents make up one of the two hottest celebrity couples of the new millennium. Indeed when the Fatboy teamed up with gorgeous TV presenter Zoe Ball, the tabloids must have been rubbing their hands with glee.

“I like the fact that everyone calls us the Posh and Becks of the chemical generation or the acceptable Posh and Becks,” he laughs. “I like it that we, on the whole, probably have a bit more respect than them. We’re not into the stardom bit, but we’ve been thrust into that, and we grudgingly accept it. We accept that we’re going to have our photo taken so we smile and grin, but we don’t go looking for it.”

Mr and Mrs Fatboy Slim seem to have won almost everyone over through a mixture of charm and a lack of pretention. Indeed, Zoe sticks her head around the corner during out interview, realises the hubby is in full flow and gestures towards yours truly: “Don’t believe a word from him. He’s full of shit.”

Not too long ago, Cook was full of anything he could get his hands on, and lots of it. The quintessential party animal, he lived it large on a year-long party that took him from Brighton to America, via a couple of hundred nights in Ibiza. These days, however, he makes a clear distinction between his working weekend and his week at home.

“Before, it was six days a week going mad and one day a week of sleep,” he admits. “I was travelling all over the place. Now, I don’t travel so much. At the moment, I play every Friday and Saturday, and the rest of the week I’m Dad, during which time I’m a lot more sensible than before. But at the weekends, I’m madder than I used to be – it’s that Friday feeling.

“Most people do a boring job all week and Friday night they just want to go fucking mad. For a couple of years, I was going mad every night and it just became a job. Now, I get really excited every Friday at around lunch-time.”

The prospects of fatherhood filled him with some trepidation, however, in the months before Woody was born: “I was really worried that either I’d become a totally boring dad and not do this any more, or that I’d be a terrible dad and be off all the time.” With both Norman and Zoe having such a hectic work schedule, they had to employ a live-in nanny, “otherwise one of us would have to give up our jobs. We both have to work a certain amount of time and be away from home.

“Sometimes we both feel that maybe we’re not the perfect parents,” he admits ruefully, “and that we tend to palm him off on the nanny when we’re working. But Zoe is a natural mother. She loves kids and the way she plays with him and everything is cool.”

It hasn’t just been happy families for Cook since the release of Halfway… though. He has managed to fit some work in alongside his paternal duties, remixing the likes of Outkast and Midfield General, while writing new music for two of the year’s biggest movies, Tomb Raider and Moulin Rouge.

The former, he explains, is not the special-effects-and-no-brain visual popcorn that you might expect. “It’s actually quite a good film; it’s kind of an Indiana Jones-like plot, which is quite intricate,” he enthuses. “But I do the Lara Croft swinging though the air in her pyjamas, beating the shit out of everybody scene.”

In Moulin Rouge, he provides the techno soundtrack to the can-can scene.

“They filmed it dancing to the can-can, but to a strict 140 BPM,” he explains. “How Baz [Luhrman] described it is that Moulin Rouge at that time was basically what Manumission is now – hedonism – so that was what he wanted me to get across. To be honest, it kind of got a bit butchered by the time it got in the film, and you don’t really hear a lot of what I did with it, but working with Baz was great. He is an absolute fucking lunatic and one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. I went and stayed with him in Sydney and he came and spent a weekend with me in Brighton and we sat in the hot-tub, throwing out these mad ideas. He is a very inspirational person.”

It transpires that Cook’s last remaining ambition is to score an entire film. “You know those classic soundtracks like Paris, Texas, Blade Runner or Midnight Express. That’s the one ambition I haven’t fulfilled yet.”

Cook’s relationships with movie directors have worked both ways, with some of the biggest names in the movie world eager to direct his videos. Who could forget Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze’s hilarious clip for ‘Praise You’ or, more recently, the brilliant visuals of a tap-dancing Christopher Walken that accompanied ‘Weapon Of Choice’. Apparently, Jonze just happened to bump into Christopher Walken one night, and somehow the conversation came around to the subject of dancing. Walken, it transpired, trained as a dancer before he became a thespian.

“Fred Astaire once saw him dance and told him he was a natual mover, but then his career moved into psychopathic acting,” Cook chuckles. “He told Spike that he would love to get his dancing down on film while he was still young enough to do it.”

The rest, as they say, is history. However, Jonze and Walken aren’t the only famous celuloid celebrities who were seduced by the Fatboy.

“The Coen Brothers phoned and asked if they could do a video for us,” he explains. “But they didn’t realise that you had to turn videos round in two weeks – they wanted more like two years. It is a lovely idea, though, and I’d love to exploit it.”

The Fatboy, it transpires, is a huge movie buff (“being a DJ, on my day off, I don’t really want to go out to a club”) and has huge respect for film-makers.

“If you have a quality director, I think film is an art form that goes so far past music,” he muses. “A record lasts five minutes and it’s only oral, but to do a two-hour film where the audience is gobsmacked, that is amazing.”

It transpires that Cook’s three favourite movies are The Big Lebowski, Goodfellas and, controversially, the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic-comedy, You’ve Got Mail.

“I’ve really got this thing about You’ve Got Mail. It just brings out the romantic in me,” he admits. “It’s always on Sky and in our house you can control Sky from upstairs or downstairs: so I’ll be watching it in bed in the morning and Zoe will come in and shout ‘Are you watching You’ve Got Mail again?’ and I’ll try to convince her I was just flicking through the stations. But half of the reason I like it is because I’ve got a very intense sexual attraction to Meg Ryan.”

I wondered, innocently, if that stems from the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally?

“No,” he grins, “it’s just to do with her hair-style and her boobs.”

For a man who is so enamoured of the silver screen, it is surprising to hear Cook admit that he has “no visual ideas about the songs. Everyone asks me what I want for the video and all I know is that I don’t want to be in it, apart from my little cameos.”

He puts his highly innovative videos down purely to luck, the kind of luck that put him in touch with people like Spike Jonze and Tractor, the Swedish team behind the Yukka Brothers adverts for MTV, who direct the forthcoming Fatboy Slim video for ‘Ya Mama’, which Cook feels is his best video yet.

“It’s absolutely bonkers,” he laughs. “They have got a really twisted sense of humour. They sent me this treatment which was about a load of people who start beating each other up as soon as they put the tune on, and I thought that sounded really funny. But by the time they made it, the script completely changed – I won’t tell you what the gag is, but it is absolutely insane. I have met some eccentrics in my life but they are mad as you like.”

‘Ya Mama’ is one of the exceptions on Halfway.., being a big, brash floor-filler that harks back to the days of ‘The Rockerfeller Skank’ or ‘Gangster Trippin’. Previous singles like ‘Sunset (Bird Of Prey)’ and ‘Demons’ are more representative of the fare on offer, which is more chilled out and laid-back than the frenetic You’ve Come A Long Way Baby.

“After the success of the last album [You’ve Come…], I got the feeling that something wasn’t right, it wasn’t what I wanted to do,” he confesses. “It’s a bit like the Kid A syndrome, wanting to do something different, although it wasn’t as extreme as that. There are a couple of tracks which we call the old school section, like ‘Ya Mama’ and ‘Weapon Of Choice’, but I didn’t want to keep trying to make ‘Rockerfeller Skank’ over again.”

He admits that, sales-wise, Halfway… didn’t perform as well as its immediate predecessor.

“But in a way I almost wanted that, because it got so mad before that my life wasn’t my own,” he reflects. “I’ve never been that ambitious that I wanted to be Michael Jackson or Madonna: I’m quite happy just being me. The last album sold four million and this one’s sold one million, but if you had told me three years ago that I’d make an album that sold a million copies, I would have gone ‘fucking hell’. So this album was kind of like me taking my foot off the accelerator a bit, trying to calm things down. “I’m approaching 40 now and I don’t want to be prancing around on stage like the Rolling Stones when I’m old and craggy, I want to work out a way of growing old gracefully.”

While his quest for integrity and respect from within the dance community is understandable, Fatboy Slim will always be a bigger draw than some of the world’s other, ahem, superstar DJs. The truth is that Norman Cook has transcended the pop pages of the papers and is now a bona fide celebrity, as liable to pop up in Hello as NME. This must have been strange for a man who, even going back to his earlier incarnations with The Housemartins, Beats International, Pizzaman and Freakpower, was content to let others take the limelight while he wallowed in the shadows.

What was it like when Norman Cook, ‘til then a softly spoken Normal Geezer from Brighton, suddenly found himself in every journal known to man or tabloid, being hailed as the popular face of dance culture?

“The anonymity thing was going quite well until I started going out with Zoe,” he says with a smile. “You can be a faceless dance music producer – people knew my name, but they didn’t know what I looked like. I always tried to keep it low-key and to be known but not famous. But the day that me and Zoe fell in love, I realised what was going to happen. Hello magazine were wondering who was this mysterious DJ going out with Zoe Ball, but everyone in the dance scene knew that I’d been around for 10 years.”

The couple have developed what could be described a tentatively peaceful relationship with the papparazzi and press hacks, as Norman explains.

“We don’t get into bed with them but we have to accept the fact that we come out of our house and there are photographers outside and we do get followed. But I wouldn’t moan because the rest of the job is so wonderful. As long as you’re not shagging the wrong person or you get caught doing lines of coke on camera, then you’re alright.”

When he first started dating the TV presenter, though, getting used to the press was “pretty weird” and he benefited immensely from the advice of his new girlfriend.

“She’d been tabloid before me, so she was able to say, ‘if you’re annoyed with a photographer, don’t punch him because if you punch him, they’ve got it in for you’.”

Overall, Cook feels that the press have been fair enough in their treatment of both him and the missus.

“There are so many bad stories they could find about me and drugs, but they’ve been fairly gentle with us,” he notes. “We seem to have this kind of uneasy truce where we don’t piss them off and they don’t piss us off.

“Increasingly, we’re just not newsworthy though,” he continues. “If you look at Posh and Becks, he has to have a Mohican to keep himself in the press. But we are going in the other direction, moving to a quiet part of Brighton. Everything is getting a bit more low-key. Zoe has had her time of being a big celebrity and I have had mine, and now I just want to carry on making music and DJing and she just wants to carry on making TV shows. But the huge ambition thing is not there, so we are not flaunting ourselves. Also, because I had a ten-year run up of being semi-famous, it is a lot easier to cope with it. If I had suddenly got that famous when I was 18, I’d be on crack or heroin.”

So is Norman the family man still enjoying the fame and the buzz that goes with DJing at huge festivals like Creamfields?

“If you’re playing to ten thousand people, you can’t really take risks so you can end up playing the same records every night and it does get a bit tiring,” he says. “But I love doing the big gigs where it’s all hands-in-the-air, as long as I still get to do some little ones in between.”

CELEBRITY PAIRS

Norman Cook and Zoe Ball aren’t the first famous stars to have their relationship rated in the pages of the newspapers. There have been plenty of other luminaries who have done their going out in public. hotpress goes all tabloid and assesses some of the main contenders for the title of Celebrity Couple of the Year.

Posh and Becks

When the pin-up footballer and the Spice Girl got it together, the world paid attention, and Victoria and David have made sure they have never been far from the front pages ever since, even going so far as to name their son, Brooklyn, after the place in which he was conceived, famously prompting Ali G to wonder what the kid would have been called if they had got jiggy with it in Acrington Stanley. Or Peckham.

Famous for: cross dressing, kicking Argentines and making awful pop music.

Celebrity Rating: 9

Liam and Patsy

The brat-rock star and the actress/model made wonderful tabloid fare during their time together, as famous for their bust-ups as their marriage. In the long run, Patsy – who’d already been through a marriage with Jim Kerr of Simple Minds – emerged as a pretty tough cookie. And as for Liam – didn’t he drive brother Noel out of Oasis?

Famous for: bad movies, bad haircuts and bad Beatles impressions.

Celebrity Rating: 8

Chris Evans and Billy Piper

When the multi-millionaire ginger megalomaniac declared his love for the teenage pop sensation, the world was sceptical. After all, it wasn’t long before that that Evans had been linked romantically to Geri Halliwell. However, a sports car and a whirldwind romance later, the two wed secretly earlier this year.

Famous for: Drinking bouts in Dublin, missing work.

Celebrity Rating: 7

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston

The square-jawed heart-throb and star of movies like Seven and Fight Club had been linked to a variety of Hollywood starlets before he fell for Friends star Anniston and the pair have been the subject of much speculation since.

Famous for: being on television more often than The Simpsons.

Celebrity Rating: 8