Fatboy Slim

These days, Norman Cook’s show involves not just playing his own patented brand of “party acid house”, but a complex audio-visual production. “I’m technically a video jockey now. We write scripts for all the tunes, make films. In the past, I used to have to literally hold up the next record I was going to play to the guy who does my visuals, and he’d have to find the images to match it. But now, because of the technology, no matter what speed I play at, even if I just chop quickly into it, the visuals are all synchronized. It’s a show.”

That’s certainly one way of putting it. In Brazil, Cook has become – to his faintly baffled delight, “more famous than I am in England”, as a result of the DVD of his Brighton Big Beach Boutique II event. “They basically all watched the DVD and went: that’s our idea of a fantastic party. And out of sheer why’s-no-one-ever-done-that-before, I played at the Salvador Carnival. 5 million people on the streets, me on an articulated lorry with a proper sound system on the top. Everyone went nuts.”

But at the moment, he’s concentrating on DJing rather than making records. “I’m just really enjoying doing the gigs, as a career. This is my job, I love doing it, I still seem to be getting away with it.”