1.Prologue
In the 80s and up through the beginning of the 90s, DJs led mostly underground existences, relegated to the shadows behind the decks in corners of nightclubs.
That’s true even of the pioneers of house and techno—people like Larry Levan , Frankie Knuckles, the Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson), etc. While they may have been considered deities among a certain subset of the gay community, people of color, and clubgoers, their domain was the underground. You could cross paths with the “Godfather of House" on the street and never know it.
While a certain house or techno record may have been hot among the DJs of the underground dance scene, the tracks on that record would not have received any airplay on mainstream radio, nor would they have received the kind of promotional push given to pop and rock singles and albums. What’s more, the vinyl records in a DJ’s box were his (and increasingly today, her) weapons. Sometimes a DJ would cover up the label on purpose so that other DJs wouldn’t know what he was playing. And when it came to remixing other dance tracks or popular tunes, it wouldn’t be until the mid-90s that officially-sanctioned remixes done with the permission of the original artist became widespread. Most remixes were bootlegs, destined never to become available to the masses.
On a more fundamental level, the appeal of a DJ lies not in any individual tracks that they may produce or remix but in the journey that they weave through the music that they select and string together—it lies “in the mix". Much like in hip hop, mixes by dance music DJs also spread through bootleg mixtapes. In the mid-90s, official mix CDs became the way to experience a DJ outside of the dancefloor–thanks to progressive house DJs Sasha and John Digweed. Yet DJs rarely put out original albums, and even fewer among those were ever commercially successful. Even the British DJ Paul Oakenfold, who became one of the first superstar DJs at the end of the 90s and early 2000s, didn’t release his first original album until 2002.
The man responsible for giving a face to DJs by attaining a level of mainstream fame equivalent to a popstar or rockstar was an English bloke named Norman Quentin Cook. By the time he started using the Fatboy Slim moniker in the mid 90s, he had already been working as a professional musician for a decade.
Fatboy Slim, along with contemporaries the Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, and Underworld were among the first electronic dance music artists to release original albums that broke through to mainstream success. These artists had been invigorated by American hip hop sampling culture and breakbeats, and blended together elements of British pop and rock, American house and techno, and U.K. acid house. Their music came to be referred to as “big beat", which became the first dance music to achieve mainstream renown since disco in the 70s.
Over the next two articles, I will give an overview of the big beat genre.
2.Fatboy Slim and the Birth of Big Beat
Norman Quentin Cook was born in 1963 in Bromley, a large town in the southeast of Greater London. He was exposed to music from a young age, and began playing drums, bass, and singing in punk and new wave bands from the time he was a teenager. He also began DJing as a hobby. He attended college in Brighton, a seaside resort along the south coast of England. There, he DJed at a different clubs around the city, exposing himself to a wide range of musical styles as he worked on his skills. He met another Brighton-based DJ, Carl Cox , who would become a sort of mentor figure; Cox was the kind of DJ who appeared to be having even more fun than the crowd—something that helped Cook develop his own stage persona as an entertainer.
In 1985, Cook became the bassist for an indie-pop guitar band called The Housemartins, and the band soon had a hit single and two albums that peaked in the Top 10 of the U.K. Albums Chart. They split up in 1988, and Cook returned to Brighton to focus on his own projects. He gathered together a group of studio musicians to form Beats International, which had a number one single called “Dub Be Good to Me". The song, which heavily borrows lyrics from the S.O.S. Band’s “Just Be Good to Me" and lifts the bassline from “The Guns of Brixton" by The Clash, caused a legal dispute revolving around the use of unauthorized samples, and Cook ended up losing the case and having to pay back twice the royalties he made made on the record.
Cook was so prolific in terms of his output that he had to adopt multiple aliases to release all of his music. The turning point came in 1995 when he became resident DJ at the Big Beat Boutique, a new club in Brighton. Being a resident allowed him to experiment and establish his own style. Then in 1996 he adopted the Fatboy Slim name and released a number of tracks he had been waiting to find an outlet for as the album Better Living Through Chemistry. His eclectic, genre-hopping sound was christened “big beat”. According to Fatboy himself, “the name came from our club, the Big Beat Boutique, which I'm tremendously proud of. I always thought the formula of big beat was the breakbeats of hip-hop, the energy of acid house, and the pop sensibilities of the Beatles, with a little bit of punk sensibility, all rolled into one.”
Fatboy Slim’s worldwide breakthrough came with his second album, 1998’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. The singles “The Rockafeller Skank" “Gangster Trippin" “Praise You" and “Right Here Right Now" all broke the Top 10 in the U.K. and became decade-defining party hits across the pond in the U.S.
These original albums would put big beat on the map, but Fatboy Slim is also highly regarded for his skills as a live DJ. When Cook was coming up, a DJ’s domain was nightclubs and raves, but as Fatboy Slim he would almost single-handedly elevate the DJ into someone who played on the main stage at pop and rock festivals. At the time, it was still rare for a DJ to be accompanied by a VJ. Cook has spoken about the overwhelming experience of looking out onto the large stage—built for bands—and seeing nothing but a solitary table in the middle with just a couple of turntables and a mixer. Having played to live audiences before as a member of a band, he immediately recognized that just playing records would not be enough to compare to the sheer presence of a rock band. So he started waving his arms around and hyping both himself and the crowd up, and gradually putting together the visual elements that would turn his DJ sets into true live entertainment.
In July 2001, the Brighton local Channel 4 acquired the broadcasting rights for cricket, and they decided to show games on the large screens around the area. They asked Cook if he would be interested in doing a free beach gig on a Friday when no games were scheduled, and seeing it as a kind of homecoming, he agreed. The event ended up being a huge success, drawing between 50,000 and 65,000 people. This concert was later released as the live album Live on Brighton Beach.
The following July, they decided to hold “Big Beach Boutique II". The event drew such massive crowds that the local streets became overrun and the alcohol was soon sold out. They debated whether to call the concert off, but realizing that a cancelation at that point could trigger a full riot, they decided to go through with it. In the end, the concert drew approximately 250,000 people—twice the population of Brighton itself. One partygoer from Australia would end up dying of head injuries, causing a media uproar, but it quickly came to light that the woman had fallen off of a promenade hours after the concert had finished. Nonetheless, the incident would have a profound effect on Cook.
In a peculiar turn of events, the concert DVD Big Beach Boutique II would end up selling more copies in Brazil than in all other countries combined. It became a sort of “warm up" for Brazilian partygoers before heading out to paint the town red. Cook was asked to put on one of his signature beach parties in Rio, which would end up being broadcast on national Brazilian TV and drawing 360,000 revelers. Today, Fatboy Slim is an even greater national figure in Brazil than he is in his own home country.
In Japan, Fatboy Slim put his name behind Big Beach Festival, a large scale dance music event first held on an artificial island off of Yokohama and then at Makuhari Seaside Park between 2009 and 2013. Fatboy headlined the event in 2009, 2011, and 2013, drawing an audience of 25,000 in its final year. Fellow big beat artists The Chemical Brothers headlined in 2010 and 2012. In the first half of the 90s, Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers had evolved the big beat sound alongside one another at a legendary club night called Heavenly Social.
●Fatboy Slim Picks
3.From Dust to The Chemical Brothers
Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons were both born in the suburbs of London and were childhood classmates. From the time they were in their early teens they were both into new wave as well as rare groove and hip hop music. When Simons went to the University of Manchester to study history, Rowlands followed him mostly to immerse himself in the Manchester music scene—especially the Hacienda, one of the epicenters of the Second Summer of Love. It was at the Hacienda that Rowlands and Simons would be baptized into the acid house scene.
Rowlands and Simons began DJing at the back of a local pub in 1992. They called themselves the Dust Brothers, taking the name an American hip hop production duo best known for their work on the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique. Rowlands and Simons mostly played a mix of hip hop, house, and techno. When they began to run out of fresh hip hop instrumentals for their sets, they began producing music themselves. Their early work would catch the ear of pioneering acid house DJ Andrew Weatherall, who would sign the duo to his private label.
In 1993, the duo would establish their big beat sound with the track “Chemical Beats". Around the same time, they would also begin to create remixes. In 1994, they became resident DJs at a popular London pub frequented by U.K. rock musicians such as Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher. In 1995, they played their first international gigs at events in the U.S. and festivals in Europe. When the original Dust Brothers filed objections as to their use of the name, Rowlands and Simons decided to change their name to The Chemical Brothers.
Now reborn, the duo released their debut album Exit Planet Dust in July 1995, which reached No. 9 on the U.K. album chart. Soon thereafter they signed a contract with Virgin Records, became resident DJs at a U.K. club called Turnmills, and began to play at many rock and pop music festivals. They would also start a residency at Liquidroom, a club that was then located in Kabukicho in Shinjuku. Around this time Noel Gallagher approached The Chemical Brothers about collaborating on a track, resulting in their first No. 1 hit, “Setting Sun”.
The Chemical Brothers’ second album, 1997’s Dig Your Own Hole, was their international breakthrough. The single “Block Rockin’ Beats” topped the single charts in the U.K., and won a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental. The success of the album led to a world tour in summer of 1997, which included a number of sold-out dates in the U.S. and U.K. The duo had joined Fatboy Slim as the faces of a movement that was breaking through into the mainstream.
By the late 90s, big beat had fully arrived and been embraced by mainstream audiences, to the point where it was being used to soundtrack films and commercials. The pioneers of the genre, however, were beginning to grow tired of the narrowing of a genre that had initially been amorphous and free. They began to shift away from the in-your-face party music to tunes that were more danceable. In their third album, 1999’s Surrender, the Chemical Brothers began to swap out their breakbeats for more four-on-the-floor house beats—a transition best encapsulated in their classic “Hey Boy Hey Girl”. The sampled vocals, “Hey girls. B-boys. Superstar DJs, here we go!” not only pay tribute to the Chemical Brothers’ roots, they seem to be foreshadowing the arrival of EDM in the 2000s and 2010s.
In the new millennium, the Chemical Brothers would continue to produce new tracks, collaborations, and remixes, incorporating more hip hop and world music influences, while reaffirming their commitment to gettiing people to dance. On their fourth album Come With Us, the track “It Began in Afrika" incorporates tribal beats and a trance-like feel, while “Star Guitar" is Balearic beat. On their fifth album Push the Button, they would blend together hip hop and Middle Eastern-sounding strings on the opening track “Galvanize".
●The Chemical Brothers Picks
4.The Music Videos of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry
The global rise of Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers was bolstered by the heavy airplay of their groundbreaking music videos.
The video for Fatboy Slim’s “Gangster Trippin" was directed by Roman Coppola, the son of New Hollywood icon Francis Ford Coppola.
The video for “Praise You" features a fictional dance group led by Spike Jonze acting as a flash mob in front of the Fox Bruin Theater in Westwood, L.A. The video won three awards at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards: Breakthrough Video, Best Direction, and Best Choreography.
Jonze also directed the video for “Weapon of Choice”, a track off of Fatboy’s third album Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. The video features the actor Christopher Walken dancing in a deserted hotel lobby, and won a number of MTV awards as well as a Grammy for Best Music Video. The song uses a prominent sample of the song “Into My Own Thing” by Sly & the Familiy Stone, and features vocals by funk bassist Bootsy Collins.
Jonze also directed the music video for the Chemical Brothers’ song “Elektrobank", which depicts a gymnastics competition with his future wife Sophia Coppola as one of the competitors.
Several other famous music videos from the Chemical Brothers were directed by Michel Gondry. Gondry had already established himself with innovative videos for Bjork in the early 90s and Daft Punk in the mid-90s. In 1999, he directed the video for “Let Forever Be".
In 2002, Gondry also directed the video for the Balearic beat track “Star Guitar", which consists of a continuous shot filmed from the window of a speeding train; the buildings and objects passing by appear exactly in time with the beats and other musical elements of the song.
Gondry also directed the music video for 2015’s “Go", which features a group of female dancers making synchronized movements that evoke the wheels of a steam locomotive. The track itself feels like somewhat a retread of “Galvanize".
In 2019, Gondry directed the video for the groovy disco tune “Got To Keep On". Among the dancers participating in his modern take on Soul Train is Jessica Rabone, the younger sister of Japanese television personality Becky. The song won a Grammy for Best Dance Recording in 2020.
5.Epilogue
It’s impossible to overstate the significance of a bloke like Norman Quentin Cook starting his career as a indie rock musician and going on to become one of the world’s first superstar DJs.
For pop and rock musicians, looks are just as important—or in some cases, even more important—than talent. For DJs in the 80s and in the early 90s, looks hardly mattered, as they were faceless, often nameless shamans who facilitated an experience that was more about you than anything else. Fatboy Slim changed the game by attaining popstar/rockstar levels of fame without popstar looks or rockstar charisma—although the man certainly has a stage presence. The amazing thing is that while pop and rock musicians often have a band and live instruments to amplify their presence, Fatboy Slim made legions of non-clubbers and non-ravers go crazy “just" by mixing records together.
The same could be said for the Chemical Brothers, two white men with an ear for hip hop and a drive to forge their own sound—which they sold back to audiences in the U.S. They were DJs ostensibly doing nothing more than “pushing a button", but they were button-pushers who were headlining massive music festivals. Much as bands like the Rolling Stones led the British Invasion of the 60s, artists like the Chemical Brothers led the big beat invasion of the late 90s. At the movement’s peak, they were making remixes for rock groups and pop artists and featuring hip hop MCs on their music.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. By elevating big beat into the mainstream, these artists were also sealing its fate. Nevertheless, their efforts would pave the way for the rise of EDM in the late 2000s and 2010s. Ironically, dance music’s old British blokes would eventually find themselves performing alongside baby-faced bedroom DJs on the world’s biggest stages.
