Opening the door of his home on a minor terraced street in Brighton, UK, Norman Cook, 35 years old, tall, balding, and who makes music under the name Fatboy Slim, introduces himself with the following question: “Are you a caner?”
Cook means: do I take drugs? Just off the train from London and with a head still nipping from the night before, I laugh and say: “I guess I’d put myself in that camp, yes.”
Cook famously is a card-carrying caner.
“I’m a useless party fiend who’s not a role model for anyone and who’s got nothing intelligent to say apart from ‘Let’s ’ave it’,” as he puts it.
Cook’s house is covered in yellow smiley faces, rave culture’s adopted symbol. There are smiley teapots, smiley mugs and smiley clocks. I can see that Cook manages his accounts on an outsized smiley calculator. Around the clubs of Brighton, the property is known as the House of Love, partly on account of its décor, and partly on account of its reputation as a place of hedonistic shenanigans.
“Whoever is DJing in Brighton invariably ends up here,” he says.
In an upstairs back room, I’ve interrupted Cook tinkering away on a new song. Cutting up bits of Dick Dale-style surf guitar with a thumping breakbeat and a looped sample (“Right about now, the funk soul brother/Check it out now, the funk soul brother”), the track is called ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ and will soon become ubiquitous.
It is a Saturday afternoon in January 1998 and I have come to interview Cook for a magazine I’ve started working at, The Face. The plan is that Cook will take me clubbing around Brighton as a backdrop to my profile of him. We will visit a night called Mr Fabulous and Mr Mental Present: Fabulous and Mental!, among others.
But before we leave, Cook suggests a livener. On the back of a CD on his living-room table, he has laid out four lines of cocaine. But there are two of us.
“One for each nostril,” he explains.
Today, Norman Cook is a reformed character. He entered rehab in 2009 and hasn’t touched drink or drugs since. But drugs run through the ’90s like the proverbial stick of Brighton rock. History dictates that clubbing as we know it became a thing in this country with 1988’s Summer of Love, but it was the next decade when everyone worked out how to monetise and make it mainstream. The era of superclubs like Cream in Liverpool and Renaissance in Mansfield. Of triple-mix CDs called things like . Of DJs like Sashaand Danny Rampling. Soft drinks were advertised with rave graphics. Popular T-shirts included
