Fatboy Slim to Use Live Vocalists on New Album

Norman Cook (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim) is back in the studio working on the follow-up to You've Come a Long Way, Baby, his 1998 double-platinum album. Speaking from his home in Brighton, England, Cook revealed that his new record, which he hopes to release by year's end, will include original vocals, instead of sampled ones -- an idea suggested by his friends the Chemical Brothers.

"Tom [Rowlands] and Ed [Simmons] said, 'Instead of nicking bits off a capellas, why don't you actually work with a vocalist?'" Cook says. "And I'm like, 'Oh, I'd be too nervous and I they wouldn't wanna do it.' . . . [But] there's a few people I've phoned and the reactions have been quite good."

Though he remains tight-lipped about his new recruits, Cook says the new material, which already consists of fifteen songs, will still bear his distinctive feel.

"Hopefully, if I get it right it'll still have the trademark sound so you'll kind of know it's me," he says. "But it won't be, 'Oh bloody hell, another record from him!' A lot of the sound on the last album has been sort of standard practice now. I think that's probably why it's been slow: I probably know more what I don't wanna do, then what I want to do. There's been so many kind of records that sound like 'Gangster Trippin'' and 'Rockafeller Skank.' I don't want to sound like the people who sound like me."

Fatboy Slim's first DJ mix album On the Floor at the Boutique, which was released in the U.K. in 1998, just hit U.S. stores on March 28, and his second one, the Essential Selection Vol. 1 (with a second disc spun by Paul Oakenfold), is due May 16.

His big hit "Praise You" has been echoing throughout the campaign trail as Vice President/Presidential hopeful Al Gore has been using it during rallies.

"He's preferable to the Republicans," Cook says. "I don't know that much about his politics, but he's generally on the right side . . . No one can stop me playing other people's records when I'm DJing, so I suppose we can't stop him."

Politicians aren't the only ones who use Cook's material without his permission. Discs like "The Fatboy Slim /Norman Cook Collection" and "Fatboy Slim's Greatest Remixes," both of which Cook had no control over, have been popping up in stores.

"I've been quite prolific so there's tons of tracks that I've done and people managed to license enough to put together compilations, " he said. "It's a little annoying, but what the hell -- there's nothing I can do about it. You can either start throwing paint at people, or you can just swallow it."

JOLIE LASH
(April 15, 2000)