Ten years on and I’m still beating myself up about Fatboy Slim. I desperately want to draw attention to the shockingly proletarian, cymbal-shaking, bone-rattling, party-mixing joyful ordinariness of our Norm’, but the bastard gets in there before me with his disarming and self-reflexive ‘I May Be Shit: But Why Try Harder?’ catchphrases, his doleful air of inconsequence, his shameless surprise at his own success and his now rock-solid marriage to Miss Ordinary-Lass-On-The Street, Zoe Ball. Dissing a man when he’s down doesn’t come into it. He always was and he always will be halfway between the gutter and the stars, but if the gutter is lined with diamonds and sales in excess of 500 billion records sold, it would be a foolish man indeed to lift him out of it. Roughly four-quarters of the British population have been there with him in the gutter shaking their arse and quaffing down pints to Norm’s innocuous brand of fun and funky dance, dutifully oblivious to it’s true artistic merits. ‘The Rockafellar Skank’? We loved it. ‘Brimful Of Asha?’ Couldn’t get enough of it. ‘I See You Baby’? That thing we saw on the adverts? We’d have murdered our own grandmas to have it repeat again. Like Parklife, we did indeed ‘lav a birrav’ it’. In fact, we loved so much of it we were perfectly willing to forgive our Norm the offence of rehashing the same shuffling, three-bar ascending, bass-riffing, cymbal crashing party-trick week after week, month after month and year after year right up until we vomited. A nation that binge-drinks will also binge-boy and Fatboy provided the soundtrack to a million big beat loony nights on the lash without once coming up for breath. And what you have here the 5.2 ABV proof.
The former Housemartin presents his first (and arguably last) greatest hits collection. From the sharp, sample-heavy sounds of ‘You’ve Come A Long Way Baby’ and ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ to the multi-media bombshells of ‘Praise You’ and ‘Weapon Of Choice’ this collection draws a big fat shiny marker pen around his modicum of talent and his heap of mass appeal. True, it’s formulaic, true it’s fairly predictable and true we’ve seen the best of him, but although the slightest tug at the threads that makes up these tunes (The Beat Girl by the John Barry Seven, Take Yo’ Praise by Camille Yarbrough, Love Loves to Love Love by Lulu, I Can’t Explain by The Who) sees the whole dire formula unravel, you have to accept the Fatboy’s accounting for taste as a spirited listener at the very least. The ‘Boy don’t half know a good tune when he hears one. And he doesn’t mind stealing them either.
He may have lost his touch but let us not forget that the whole Fatboy Slim alias started out as a fun side project to help launch the hip UK label, Skint. It was fun then. And it’s fun now.
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