With Fatboy Slim albums the clue is always in the title, and Norman Cook's third outing is no exception. While You've Come A Long Way, Baby was one long whoop of triumph, Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars is the sound of taking stock.
Cook was staying at the Chateau Marmont, one of L.A.'s celebrity hotels, when the title came to him. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had come along to see him DJ the night before, Bill Murray said hello in the lobby, and the pop star life was his for the taking. But as for Cook himself?
ΓÇ£I was wandering around sweating and shaking, not having been to bed for about two days,ΓÇ¥ he remembers with a wry grin. "And I was thinking, You can take the boy out of the gutter but you can't take the gutter out of the boy."
When you remember that the whole Fatboy Slim alias started out as a fun side project to help launch Skint and have a laugh making party records to DJ with, no wonder Cook has found the last couple of years surreal. You've Come A Long Way, Baby wasn't just a great record, it was a pop phenomenon that made him the world's biggest dance artist and redefined the concept of the superstar DJ. He was the biggest British artist in the U.S. last year.
During those two roller coaster years, everyone from Madonna to Robbie Williams was bidding for his remixing talents, his kitchen shelf groaned with trophies, and virtually every weekend found him jetting off to major DJ gigs and award ceremonies. In the midst of all this, he fell in love with, and married, Zoe BallΓÇöa personal high, but one that made the couple reluctant tabloid material.
"I'm not moaning about it, but I definitely had pop-star fatigue," he says. "The pressure of being in the limelight all the time was beginning to take its toll. For about three months my job was to go to awards ceremonies. When that was all I did, and I wasn't making any music, I was getting hacked off with what my life had become. I'm not very good at being a celebrity."
In 1999 he played two defining events, the boxing-themed face-off with Armand Van Helden and a show with the Chemical Brothers at Red Rocks, Colorado, which effectively closed a chapter in his career. Time to move on.
As the New Year dawned, Cook ventured back into his home studio in Brighton to make the most emotional, innovative album of his career. He explains the progression by pointing out that ΓÇ£Rockafeller SkankΓÇ¥ was the first track he recorded for his last album, and ΓÇ£Right Here Right NowΓÇ¥ was the last.
"I thought actually maybe I [could] do something with a bit more power and soul rather than just thrills and spills. When I started this album I just sat there for about a month thinking what I didn't want it to sound like. It took ages to work out what I did want it to sound like."
Helpful advice came from longstanding friends the Chemical Brothers, who suggested he work with guest vocalists. Reluctant at first, Cook drew up a wish list of possible collaborators, and the first name on it was charismatic soul diva Macy Gray.
They recorded two songs together in L.A. at the beginning of the year: the hormonal funk of ΓÇ£Love LifeΓÇ¥ and the glorious breakbeat gospel of ΓÇ£Demons,ΓÇ¥ which Cook describes as the album's pivotal track. Gray, meanwhile, calls it the best thing she's ever done. And she's right, too.
"She was lovely," Cook reports. "She's very eccentric but really beautiful. And she smells great. That was the first thing I noticed when I met her!"
After that, the album had found its heart, and everything else fell into place. First single ΓÇ£Sunset (Bird Of Prey)ΓÇ¥ is adapted from an ambient track Cook wrote several years ago. It takes one of the less pretentious moments from Jim Morrison's American Prayer poetry album and blazes into the stratosphere, borne aloft on whirling beats and soaring chords.
Another key track is ΓÇ£Song For Shelter,ΓÇ¥ a heady hymn to house music with preacher- man vocals from Urban Soul's Roland Clarke. Cook debuted it to a rapturous response at Glastonbury 2000 and describes it as going back to his roots in club culture.
ΓÇ£Sometimes over the last two years I've found myself doing things I don't really enjoy, and forget why I'm doing this,ΓÇ¥ he explains. ΓÇ£And I'm normally in a nightclub when I remember why. Every foray I've had into the pop world has been based on support and respect from the dance community. I didn't want to end up just pop.ΓÇ¥
Thus, the thunderous ΓÇ£Star 69ΓÇ¥ has the kind of crunching dance-floor momentum you'll recognize from Cook's remixes of Underworld and Mike & Charlie last year (along with Groove Armada's ΓÇ£I See You BabyΓÇ¥ his only recent remixing jobs), while ΓÇ£Ya MamaΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£Mad FlavaΓÇ¥ are deliberately "old skool Fatboy" floor fillers. "I was allowed to have a couple," he jokes. "Because most people have dropped the big beat thing, it's long enough ago that people are nostalgic."
There are four more tracks, including collaborations with P-Funk legend Bootsy Collins on ΓÇ£Weapon Of ChoiceΓÇ¥ and the sublime, bluesy opener ΓÇ£Talking ΓÇÿBout My Baby.ΓÇ¥ None of them sounds quite like you'd expect, but all of them sound as good as you'd hope.
If You've Come A Long Way, Baby jumped and shouted with manic glee, its successor sounds no less happy, but a lot more content. When Cook first asked friends for feedback, they used words like "loved up," "soulful,ΓÇ¥ and "uplifting." It's a work of wide-screen emotion, psychedelic soul, and the best dance music you've heard all year.
So Norman Cook's back, but he doesn't want to get any bigger, just better. He's ignored any pressure to repeat himself and instead made the album he wanted to make, with fresh ideas and pinpoint production values that outclass anything he's done before. He's halfway between the gutter and the stars, and that's just the way he likes it.
