Fatboy Slim Gets Busy

After spending a good part of the spring digging through U.S.
record stores, Fatboy Slim (a.k.a. Norman Cook) has settled down in
his hometown of Brighton, England, to write the follow-up to 2000’s
Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. The album is due
for release on Astralwerks in September 2003.

“At the moment, I’m going through all the records I bought over
the last year and a half to sample,” he told Rolling
Stone. “Oh my God, are they mad! I just bought stupid records
in L.A. thrift stores. I’d call it pre-production.”

Though the album is in the early stages, Cook already feels the
pressure to take things in a new direction. “I’ve done the rock
with break beats and done the house roots trying to get more
soulful,” he says. “My main motivational force is just to do
something really freaky. If I do something dull, then that would be
the end of me. The antithesis of Moby’s last album — don’t repeat
yourself. Don’t play safe. At the moment what I want to do is
something completely nuts, so it’ll be either genius or
bollocks.”

In typical Fatboy Slim fashion, Cook says he is planning on
recruiting guests for the release (past contributors have included
Macy Gray and the late Jim Morrison), but he’s keeping mum on the
subject. “There’s American [artists] Americans wouldn’t have heard
of that I’m going to work with and there’s English people that
Americans might or might not have heard of that I’m going to work
with,” he says.

Cook’s fourth artist album will come on the heels of a few other
projects: He’ll release three remix EPs taken from Halfway
Between the Gutter and the Stars on November 19th, he’s
working on a remix of the theme for the upcoming Spike Jonze movie
Adaptation, and he recently went abroad to Marrakesh to do
production work on Blur’s upcoming album.

“It’s not dancey,” Cook says of the Blur material. “It’s not
like they got me in to turn them into a dance band. We’ve been
having tons of fun. The only thing I can say is that it sounds more
like the Clash, the Clash on a good day.”