The musician also known as Fatboy Slim is sharing his skills as part of an NHS initiative. He talks about the joy of decks, his own lockdown blues – and being reduced to tears by his kids’ DJing
Wednesday lunchtime, and a restaurant on Hove seafront is being treated to a drum’n’ bass remix of Althea & Donna’s 1978 reggae hit Uptown Top Ranking. You could call the volume it’s playing at cutlery-rattling if there were any cutlery in the restaurant to rattle, but there isn’t. Service is suspended, the tables have been pushed to the side, and in the centre of the room Norman Cook is teaching Jess and Amber, two twentysomething women, how to DJ: headphone on one ear only so you can hear the track you’re cueing up while listening to the track that’s currently playing with the other. It’s a task he approaches with huge enthusiasm and an admirable lack of pretension – “They make a kind of ‘wow’ sound,” he shrugs, indicating the filter knobs on the mixer – which is both hugely engaging and, for anyone who’s followed Cook’s career as Fatboy Slim, doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
In the late 90s superstar DJ era, when some of his peers were wont to make eyebrow-raising claims – Paul Oakenfold famously justified his fees by noting that he didn’t merely play records, he also raised his hands, pointed at people in the crowd and smiled, concluding: I am an entertainer – Cook regularly incurred their wrath by declining to take his job as seriously: “A monkey could do what I do,” was one of his more celebrated pronouncements. He doesn’t say anything like that today – “I think,” he smiles, “I was probably being a bit over-modest when I said that stuff, because I’d been a musician [in the Housemartins] and all my musician friends were like, ‘but you’re just playing records’” – but he does suggest to his students that the most important thing to remember about the filter knobs on the mixer is to “make a face when you’re turning them”. “This is mine,” he adds, leaning forward and throwing his head back in apparent ecstasy.
