Ahead of Macau gig, dance music pioneer Fatboy Slim explains his ‘five Fs’
British DJ who helped put dance music on the map with hits such as Right Here, Right Now and Praise You is still going strong three decades in
For three decades, Fatboy Slim has been the superstar DJ to beat them all, the man who made the turntable bigger than the guitar and who did more that anyone to move the club night from the dingy dive to the football stadium.
With catchy good-time tunes welded to big bouncing beats, the British star made dance music part of the cultural background, laying the foundation for the rise of EDM’s monolithic assault on the supremacy of rap as the world’s favourite music.
Not bad for the kid born Norman Cook in southern England’s seaside playground of Brighton and who first came to fame in a dour indie pop band.
“I genuinely love music and love sharing it with people – the sheer pleasure of finding tunes you love and sharing them with other people,’’ Cook, now in his early 50s, told Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper last month. “Just seeing those faces and eyes going, ‘Wow, this is the greatest night ever, how mental is this?’ Being part of that every night keeps me young. I’m like a vampire. My secret of eternal youth isn’t sucking the blood of teenagers, it’s just absorbing their sweat.”
In dance-music-crazy Hong Kong, Cook is no stranger. He first played here in the late 1990s in one of the city’s seminal club nights at Jimmy’s Sports Bar near Hong Kong Stadium. Fans were literally swinging from the bar’s rafters as he played the sort of amped-up set that would eventually make him the biggest name in dance.
The never-too-old-to-rave fans who witnessed him that night are likely to return when Cook plays southern China again, this time at the club Pacha in the huge Studio City on Macau’s Cotai gambling strip on July 15.
It’s the sort of high-end giant venue that Cook’s hits, such as Rockefeller Skank, Praise You and the world-beating Right Here, Right Now put within the reach of DJs.
