You’ve Come a Long Way Baby

In September 1986, the BBC aired a half-hour television program about the Housemartins, a jangle-pop quartet billed as “the fourth-best band from Hull.” In its first few minutes, singer and guitarist Paul Heaton wanders the band’s shared home, trying to locate the source of a racket. It turns out to be the bassist, working two turntables and a mixer. Heaton leans in: “What is all this crap, anyway?” “Well, uh, this is the Clash, and that’s Run-D.M.C.,” replies an impish young man with gelled blond hair and an Adidas rugby shirt. “And if you glue ’em together you get, uh, Clash-D.M.C.” The bassist gives his bandmate a brief tutorial before the latter gives up. “I’ll leave it to the professionals,” Heaton sneers.

It’s tough to imagine that anyone in ’86 who knew what a DJ was would believe that Norman Cook would someday become the biggest DJ in the world. Hell, it would’ve been tough to imagine in 1996. Although Cook had spent much of the intervening decade behind the decks—even releasing a loops-and-samples CD for aspiring producers—that year he began playing guitar in Freak Power, a lounge-funk act on Island Records. They were riding high: After appearing in a Levi’s commercial, a reissue of their 1993 single “Tune In, Turn On, Cop Out” had gone Top 5. In June, the band traveled to Switzerland for the massive OpenAir St. Gallen Festival, on a bill with Bush, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Sex Pistols. As Freak Power took the stage before an audience of thousands, Cook recalled thinking, “I’m a really crap guitarist. What am I doing here? I’ve spent the last 10 years getting pissed in nightclubs, learning how to DJ.”

Nevertheless, Island preferred that Cook—by this point a veteran remixer and house producer—focus on guitar. Freak Power’s contract specifically barred him from putting out records on other labels, even under pseudonyms. He still did it, of course. He just had to pretend he had nothing to do with the likes of Cheeky Boy, Sunny Side Up, Yum Yum Head Food, and the Feelgood Factor—many of whom had releases on his record label, Southern Fried. When Cook began a residency at the Concorde, a 300-capacity bingo hall in his seaside hometown of Brighton, he and his latest alter ego—Fatboy Slim—were billed as two separate DJs.

Fatboy Slim was originally a favor for a friend. Damian Harris was another Brighton DJ; he was at Loaded Records, a local house label that Cook had worked with. Convinced Harris was too busy futzing with vintage synths and breakbeats to do his job, Loaded’s owners called him in for a meeting. But instead of getting canned, Harris got his own imprint. Skint Records received a three-release trial with two conditions: no house music and no losing money. Norman was Damian’s weapon of choice—a devotee of rare groove and hip-hop who understood both the DJ booth and the stage. “Fuse dance and rock,” was Harris’ apocryphal command. The result was “Santa Cruz,” which veered between sun-scrambled dream pop and a nagging freakbeat swiped from a Lulu single.

Issued in 1995 as SKINT 1, “Santa Cruz” only sold about 800 copies, but it was quickly caught in a slipstream beneath the dominant dance culture. In August 1994, the London indie Heavenly Records kicked off the Heavenly Sunday Social in a pub basement, where a who’s-who of idiosyncratic DJs (Andrew Weatherall, David Holmes, Leftfield) spun raucous jams underneath a broken clock stuck, portentously, at 11:55. Most weeks, the headliners were the Dust Brothers, two young men who revered “Tomorrow Never Knows” and techno equally. Initially, the Social offered something more like a set of signifiers than a named style. “We’re talking nitrates on wax, music made up of big fuck off freakbeat breaks, dirty great riffs from mad old ’70s synths that are bust up and sellotaped back together,” wrote Heavenly A&R Robin Turner in the liner notes to the 1996 DJ mix Brit Hop and Amyl House (“brit-hop” and “amyl house” being two early names for this emerging sound).

The first time Cook visited the Social, he was astounded to hear the Dust Brothers (about to become the Chemical Brothers) playing “Santa Cruz.” It was “like meeting the rest of my long-lost family,” he recalled. The title of the debut Fatboy Slim LP, 1996’s Better Living Through Chemistry, was a partial homage to the Brothers. With Harris and DJ/promoter Gareth Hansome, Cook brought the Social spirit to Brighton. They called their night the Big Beat Boutique. It would become both the namesake and the proving ground of a dance-music style that Cook unwittingly helped birth. As clubbers handed him tabs of E, Cook spun Northern soul, acid house, golden-age rap, and reggae, all tied together with cracking breakbeats. Within weeks, the Boutique had lines down the block. In 1998, the dance-music monthly Muzik named it the 39th best club of all time. The following January, the second Fatboy Slim LP topped the UK album chart. Cook had considered naming it Viva La Underachiever or Let’s Hear It for the Little Guy—too disingenuous. Instead, he picked a phrase he’d seen on a pair of thrift-shop boxers.

He didn’t know You’ve Come a Long Way Baby was a slogan for an American cigarette brand. He’d often claim to pay America little mind. But he could hardly have made a dance album better suited for the Yanks. Fatboy Slim was tonally unlike the other big-beat acts beginning to cross over: The Chemical Brothers were mad scientists splicing the distinct highs of psychedelia and headrush techno; the Prodigy were punkish provocateurs, sidechaining dynamite to their breaks. Intentionally or not, these groups made electronica for an alt-rock audience—a godsend for Hollywood music supervisors whose understanding of club music ended with industrial. But the vibe of You’ve Come a Long Way Baby was pure pop. It was less a club night than a boardwalk arcade: a boozy, manic romp past a thousand blaring speakers.

The first single showed how much he had altered the initial formula. “The Rockafeller Skank” put Northern soul on a longboard and shot it through the curl. It was a guitar overload: Cook used the Just Brothers’ choppy riff as the backbone, adding surfy twang from Duane Eddy, the Tremeloes, and a forgotten John Barry soundtrack. With its builds, drop-outs, and beat switches, the single was tailor-made for the pop listener with one hand on the radio dial. At one point, Cook starts pinging wildly between samples and channels: All the guitars at his disposal blur into a single cartoon character, ricocheting around the screen. The crowning touch came from an instrumental LP from Vinyl Dogs, a New Jersey label known for its compilations of choice breaks. Cook ignored the music, fixating on the tossed-off intro from heavyweight rap producer Lord Finesse. He chopped it into its component syllables, fed them into a MIDI keyboard, and tapped out an all-time earworm: “Right about now, the funk soul brother/Check it out now, the funk soul brother…”

On both sides of the Atlantic, “The Rockafeller Skank” and its maker were praised with faint damnation. Billboard called it “an organically simple masterpiece.” The Guardian conceded that “Norman seems to have found his niche, slapping together big, catchy, brilliantly dumb breakbeat numbers.” And Q assured readers that You’ve Come a Long Way Baby was “simple, unsubtle, soaraway stuff with a sell-by date that probably won’t be difficult to read for much longer.” In a 1999 Rolling Stone article titled “Fatboy Slim: Funk Sold Brother,” Marc Weingarten detailed all the licensing deals that Astralwerks, Fatboy Slim’s American label, had struck: commercials for Air Jordans, Oldsmobile, and Surge soda; soundtracks and trailers for Go, Office Space, Ten Things I Hate About You, and Cruel Intentions. He quoted a shrugging Cook: “I make a certain kind of instrumental music they like using. You can hear 15 seconds of my stuff and it makes complete sense.”

Cook’s glibness was typical. But he knew how much work it took to become that legible. You’ve Come a Long Way Baby inverted the cliche that second albums are more difficult because you’ve been working on the first one your whole life. Better Living Through Chemistry was a glorified singles compilation that offered ample pleasures (the hectic acid house of “Give the Po’ Man a Break,” the spaghetti western trip-hop of “The Weekend Starts Here”) but largely upheld dance conventions: gradual builds; sustained, patient development of specific hooks. Cook crammed his whole career into the follow-up.

As the heaving stacks of vinyl on the cover of You’ve Come a Long Way Baby’s American edition hinted, Norman Cook was a crate-digger at heart. While still a Housemartin, he’d completed “The Finest Ingredients,” a landmark gray-market hip-hop megamix. Spare and bouncy, sampling everything from Led Zeppelin to Whodini to The Jungle Book, the mix earned John Peel play and put him in touch with a small community of British bedroom pause-tapers: Ashley Beedle, Bomb the Bass, Coldcut. After the Housemartins broke up, Cook started booking work as a remixer: sometimes solo, sometimes alongside Danny Poku (aka D Mob, whose pop-friendly fusion of acid and hip-house did well on both sides of the Atlantic). For the Double Trouble remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul,” Cook and Poku grafted on the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”: the equivalent of remixer steroids. Their version not only out-charted the original, it placed higher than “Paid in Full,” with its groundbreaking Coldcut remix.

After issuing a couple hip-house singles (one of which, “Blame It on the Bassline,” borrowed from another Jacksons tune), Cook formed Beats International. A sort of spiritual successor to Malcolm McLaren’s 1983 album Duck Rock, Beats International was a world-music concept with Cook producing for a loose crew of MCs and singers. The group scored a UK No. 1 by, oddly enough, gluing the Clash and the S.O.S. Band together. “Dub Be Good to Me” paired the “Guns of Brixton” bassline with a lovers-rock cover of the synth-funk epic “Just Be Good to Me.” The Clash were not amused. The subsequent payout was “not as much as they were asking for originally,” Cook noted in retrospect, “but it was more than I had.” The second Beats International album tanked; Cook got divorced. His attorney suggested he declare bankruptcy to keep his Brighton house. His manager got him a gig composing for a Smurfs computer game.

The upshot of all this was that unlike other British DJs, Cook largely missed out on rave culture and the first wave of acid. (The “I’ve gotta house” hook on Baby’s pumping “Love Island” was a sly reference to his residency at the infamous Ibiza club Manumission; they were always begging him to play more house music.) His DJ sets were a grab bag of grooves: At one point, he ran a night advertised as “acid free.” Cook would eventually crack. Around 30, he had a transformative experience on E. He bought a Roland TB-303 and worked tirelessly to learn its idiosyncrasies. But it was just one more tool for his kit. His signature became happy house tunes with leftfield samples. Mighty Dub Katz’s “Magic Carpet Ride” swiped its chirpy ah-rin-kin-kin-kin hook (recently resurrected by Rico Nasty) from a ’70s Belgian Afro-Cuban LP; a Sesame Street soundtrack album provided the easygoing soul piano girding Pizzaman’s “Sunshine.”

“His tools are cutting edge,” enthused The Detroit Free Press about You’ve Come a Long Way Baby. In fact, his setup hadn’t changed much in the last decade: a couple Akai S950 samplers, a 303, an Atari ST computer running Cubase and C-Lab sequencing software, and thousands of records. The album was made entirely at Cook’s beachfront home: the House of Love, an essential after-hours hang for pretty much every DJ in Brighton. With Freak Power defunct, Cook was free to construct a big-beat statement record using all his accumulated experience: his ear for arresting samples, his DJ’s sense of peak time, his knack for pop construction, his 303 mastery, and even his bass playing.

He found himself in a sort of flow state. After all the revelers had cleared out, he’d pull a record off the shelf, or tap through a disk of samples, and the possibilities practically presented themselves. The first fruits appeared in early 1998. In January, he hit No. 3 with “Renegade Master 98,” a thunderously hype remix of the late Wildchild’s garage-house masterpiece. The vocal was lifted from A.D.O.R.’s “One for the Trouble,” a ’94 New York rap single. Wildchild had rearranged some lines, but Cook diced them into glossolalia: “Back more the D with the power with the D for the back more the D with the power with the D for the…” At one point, everything drops out except the rapper, pureed into phonemes: the aural equivalent of a b-boy hitting a doubletime jackhammer.

February brought his instant-classic remix of Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha.” The original (which peaked at No. 60) was an indie-rock salute to Indian playback singers, a genial stroll that recalled “Sweet Jane.” Cook fancied the tune but didn’t think it would pass muster in a Boutique set: The tempo was too slow, and there was no bassline. He sped up the track, shifted the key, and played up the line “Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow.” He also deployed a new favorite trick: chaining two distinct drum samples to give his breaks both deftness and punch. Armed with the Norman Cook Remix, “Brimful of Asha” re-entered the singles chart at No. 1, dethroning Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

Skint was starting to worry that Cook was contracting all his good ideas out. But there were even bigger hooks in his box. Auditioning a set of bootlegs he bought in London, he came across Camille Yarbrough’s “Take Yo’ Praise.” It was the sampler’s dream: 20 seconds of unaccompanied soul singing. He draped it over a down-home piano figure pulled from a Hoyt Axton outtake. “Praise You”—Fatboy Slim’s only UK No. 1—became the album’s emotional reset: a Sunday-morning comedown with a disco clop that was both Balearic and baggy. It was also catnip to sports broadcasters, thanks largely to Yarbrough’s communal lyric: “We’ve come a long, long way together/Through the hard times and the good.”

By contrast, “Right Here, Right Now” had no time to reminisce. It began as an exercise in making a “string tune”—Cook was inspired by a DJ Mag readers’ poll naming Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” the best club track ever. But Massive Attack’s string arrangement was full, live, and stately—a goddess moving over the face of the waters. Cook’s arrangement, lifted from a James Gang psych-rock ballad, was like a torrential rainstorm on the pitch. With its cop-knock of a kick drum and a finger-jabbing hook nicked from an Angela Bassett movie, the tune had an unrelenting urgency. As such, it heralded a new breed of jock jam: minor-key bangers that don’t get the blood pumping as much as the lactic acid.

At times, Cook was like a pro hooper playing HORSE: making layups interesting by hitting them from odd angles. He could have cashed out “Soul Surfing” after plopping a breakbeat over the Northern soul source material. But he goosed it with his crispiest 303 tweaks—at one point, the whole thing threatens to become a drum’n’bass track—and dispatched a babbling, backmasked samba vocalist to crash the party. “You’re Not From Brighton” suggested a DJ Muggs new jack swing production, with faint traces of “Insane in the Brain” crushed under the Humvee tread of the drums. The titular boast was an interpolation of a misheard lyric from an Italian house track. It was meant sardonically—“No one is from Brighton,” Cook once joked—but alternating with a sample barking that “funk is the U-UK,” it felt like a thrown gauntlet.

But it was more like a handoff. The low-riding electro of “Kalifornia” was Cook’s tribute to his West Coast counterparts, people like the Bassbin Twins, the Crystal Method and DJ Shadow—anyone “mashing up breakbeats the wrong way, ” as he put it. He took a 1983 freestyled rap-show promo and stacked the cadence until it became Latin freestyle; he took a phrase from a Joan Rivers comedy album (“California is druggy druggy druggy”) and vocoded it into a bugged-out hook. In “Gangster Trippin,” he made a more explicit nod to DJ Shadow, borrowing a CL Smooth ad-lib from Shadow’s 18-minute beat suite “Entropy.” But Cook was not remotely as self-serious as Shadow; he was just as happy making the “right” move (pairing the CL sample with soul fanfare) as the “wrong” one (chasing that pairing with chipper rocksteady).

He was more cautious when it came to promotion. Cook was always up for a candid print profile or fake boxing match, but hated being on television. Fortunately, he had an army of music-video directors willing to work around him. Roman Coppola turned “Gangster Trippin” into a Zabriskie Point tribute by exploding a house, room by room, in slo-mo. Hammer & Tongs made “Right Here, Right Now” a CGI sidescroller depicting the whole of human evolution, from prehistoric organism to the large king on the album’s UK cover. And for “Praise You,” Spike Jonze played a committed yet hapless b-boy leading an amateur troupe in a guerilla-style performance outside a movie theater.

A microbudget video at the peak of major-label bloat, depicting a cringe flash mob before either flash mobs or cringe was a concept, “Praise You” was a massive hit. (In 2001, MTV.com voters named it the best music video of all time.) Jonze’s clip helped nudge the song into the U.S. Top 40—Fatboy Slim’s only appearance to date. (Flush with new royalties, Camille Yarbrough began sending Cook Christmas cards.) Four days after the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards—which saw Cook “perform” the track, dutifully pawing at a grand piano while Jonze and company jumped about in white robes like the Polyphonic Spree on E—You’ve Come a Long Way Baby was certified platinum.

By that point, big beat was becoming an echo. In the UK, the nimbler 2-step garage became the new pop pleasure center. In the States, it was advertisers—not labels—keeping big beat on life support: A 2001 Mitsubishi commercial turned the Wiseguys’ 1998 single “Start the Commotion” into a hit, while a Nike campaign did the same for Junkie XL’s 2002 remix of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation.” Though some Stateside alt-rock acts dabbled in big beat, no one was ’avin it quite like Fatboy Slim: Nu-metal and rap-rock became the prime consumers of breaks. American critics turned their eyes to Moby, whose 1999 smash Play was another marketer-beloved electronica record using leftfield samples, featuring a killer big-beat single with amateur dancers in the music video.

But it was all the same to Cook, who had found his definitive alter ego. Fatboy Slim had merged with Norman, like a symbiote, to form a superstar DJ. In 2002, the second edition of the Big Beach Boutique—a free Fatboy show on the Brighton seashore—drew a quarter-million partiers. It was very nearly a catastrophe. But a DVD of the show became a bestseller in Brazil; in 2004, Fatboy Slim played to an estimated 360,000 people in Rio. His recorded output slowed to a trickle, while a new generation of plunderers reproduced big beat’s thrills with wildly varying levels of effort. On the one hand, there were the internet-native mashup artists who made “Dub Be Good to Me” look like the Avalanches. On the other hand, there were, well, the Avalanches, who assembled a monolith from charity-shop vinyl on 2000’s Since I Left You, arguably the last great big-beat album.

In the early 2010s, Cook finally caved to his label’s demands and purchased Ableton. But as he suspected, the possibilities were paralyzing: The technology had come a longer way than he. “I would go in to make a record with one drum machine, a couple of synths that I knew really well, and some loops and samples that I had,” he told Synth History in 2022. “Those were my parameters… how inventive you can be with what you’ve got.” Thirty years after the first Heavenly Social, musicians are still trying their hand at big beat body movin’. But no one’s done it better than Fatboy Slim on a yellowing computer, chasing a Sunday buzz in the House of Love.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan and Matthew Bliss.

Fatboy Slim: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby

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