Fatboy Slim on Woodstock, Rehab and David Byrne’s Dance Skills
During the peak of his fame as Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook never knew where the beat would lead him. Take that night in 2001 when he DJ’d an Oscar party in Hollywood. “It wasn’t the best crowd reaction I’d ever had,” he says bemusedly. “John Cleese came up to me and asked me to turn the music down. He was very polite: ‘I do understand what you’re trying to do here, boy, but nobody’s really dancing. If you turn the music down, at least we could talk.'”
Cook, 51, has taken a divergent road since techno’s heady late-Nineties crossover, a period when he and fellow U.K. beat masters like the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy laid the groundwork for today’s EDM movement. In the 10 years since the last full Fatboy Slim album, Palookaville, his largest-scale project involved collaborating on the music for Here Lies Love, David Byrne’s captivating Off-Broadway musical about the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the First Lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. Marcos was something of a jet-setting world celebrity in her time, but her opulent spending, symbolized by her legendary 1,200 pairs of shoes, was in stark contrast with the growing poverty of her country. A bloodless coup eventually removed her family from power, but Marcos later returned to the Philippines and still lives today.
Here Lies Love – complete with singing actors, newsreel footage and a stage design that puts the crowd in a movable pit for most of the show – premiered at New York’s Public Theater last year and wraps up its run on January 4th. But the show will go on: It continues to play in London and will debut in Australia in May, and a U.S. tour will commence next year. We caught up with Cook to talk about the production, the state of dance music and the possibility of a new Fatboy Slim LP. “I’m just sitting back and letting U2 make all the mistakes and David Bowie make the triumphs,” he says. “No one’s rushing for me for the ‘difficult fifth album.'”
Given that you’re not a musical sort of guy, how did you get involved in Here Lies Love?
David pretty much cold-called me and said, “Would you like to work together?” I said yes before he got to the end of the sentence. I’d never worked on a musical before. I never did storytelling music. My music tends to be more repetitive and aimed at the dance floor. David’s idea was that the story of Imelda Marcos wasn’t going to be about her shoe collection and it wasn’t going to be Evita. It was going to be built around her hanging out with celebrities at Studio 54 rather than looking after her own people. He said he wanted to do a song cycle, and if she’d be doing that today, she’d be at Ibiza.
And what did you make of all that?
I was just going, “David Byrne – yes.” We worked for two years on and off. We were literally sending each other cassettes in the post. That shows you how long ago it was. There was no file sharing. Most of the time I was working, I was saying, “Do we need that third verse?” And he was like, “No, we have to tell the story.” My job was in the groove department. This was David’s dream. All I did was help with the songs.
Did you pick his brain for Talking Heads trivia?
I got him to sign my 12-inch of “Psycho Killer.” But apart from that, my fandom of the Heads had to end, because you have to be working. There was a moment when he went to the toilet and my engineer said, “I can’t believe you just showed David Byrne how to play the guitar.” I had taken the guitar right off David to show him a part.