Why is Norman Cook known as Fatboy Slim?
Fatboy Slim is, of course, one of the key figures in the dance music genre known as big beat, a movement which blew up in the mid-1990s around artists such as The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. His 1996 debut album Better Living Through Chemistry was arguably only the second major big beat release, and its follow-up, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, spawned four mega-singles which defined the sound of Britain’s post-Britpop generation.
In the early 2000s, Fatboy Slim began taking on national treasure status. He curated a free festival on Brighton Beach, with over 250,000 people in attendance. And while his fourth and final studio album released in 2004 didn’t live up to its predecessors, he became one of the world’s most sought-after DJs for large-scale live events, from New Year’s Eve on Bondi Beach to the 2012 London Olympics.
But he wasn’t always Fatboy Slim. In fact, even during the first decade of his music career, when he was just the humble bassist for the UK jangle pop band The Housemartins, he went by his birth name.
That is, Norman Cook, which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as Fatboy Slim. So how did plain old Norman Cook from Bromley, Kent, transform into the big beat behemoth and superstar DJ we know today? And what’s behind his dance music moniker?
An assist from the Midfield General
The journey of Norman Cook transforming himself into Fatboy Slim began when he met future Skint Records founder Damian Harris, also known as Midfield General, in the mid-1980s. Harris took over Cook’s job at a record store in Brighton, which he’d left to pursue his electronic music career.
The two remained friends, and Harris then got a job at the house music label Loader Records, thanks to his connection with Cook.
According to Cook, Harris then pitched an idea to the owners of Loader that would change the course of both their careers. The idea was that Harris would start his own label, Skint Records, based around a brand new genre of music created by Cook. “It’s like hip hop records speeded up, or acid house records slowed down, sort of this meeting,” is how Harris apparently sold it to his bosses. As Cook recalled in an interview with Synth History, Loader Records then asked him, “Would you mind making some records under another name?”
Harris and Cook brainstormed together, and Harris designed the iconic skull-and-crossbones smile emoticon logo for Cook’s new brand. And then, the two “just got really, really drunk and wrote down a whole lot of names,” Cook recounted. They “looked at them the next day and went, ‘That’s the one.’”
A blues DJ?
Cook claims that the reason the name Fatboy Slim stood out for him was the similarities it shares with the stage names of old blues musicians. “I really love old blues records,” he explained. “Really old, like pre-war blues.”
He was especially taken with the “really stupid names” of these old blues players. For example, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup – the songwriter behind Elvis Presley’s first great recording ‘That’s All Right’. “If you were a fat blues singer, you were called slim,” Cook noted. “So there was Pinetop Slim, there was Bumble Bee Slim, there was Memphis Slim.”
It was via Cook’s knowledge of blues history that the name Fatboy Slim emerged, seemingly out of the thin air of his drunken stupor. “I just thought… Fatboy Slim is the oxymoronic blues singer who can’t exist.”
