He plays for crowds of tens of thousands at major festivals, this Friday a lucky few experienced him in the hopelessly sold-out Roxy in Prague. English electronic music producer Fatboy Slim performed a strict club set. Those expecting hits may have been disappointed. But a minimum of those arrived.
Almost for a second exactly, with the strike of one o’clock in the morning, the club rings notoriously known piano melody. Originally she came out in 1975 on test vinyl from audio electronics manufacturer JBL. It is a recording of singer-songwriter Hoyt Axton at work in the studio.
Around the five-second sequence Fatboy Slim built in the late 90s Praise You, a world-class hit. In the Roxy, a simple piano progression is looped and soon fades away as Freddie Mercury’s voice drowns it out. “I’m really going to enjoy this night, I feel alive,” 60-year-old Fatboy Slim, real name Norman Cook, foreshadows the program of the evening through a sample of the song Don’t Stop Me Now. The packed hall agrees.
The British DJ and producer has no problem getting the masses dancing. When he organized the Big Beach Boutique II event in his hometown of Brighton in July 2002, the organizing team expected 60,000 visitors. But on the beach of the English seaside resort went down quarter of a million fans, the event was prematurely terminated by the police.
Ten years later stepped out at the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in London. He performed at the Brighton Pride march and is also associated with the Glastonbury festival. It’s hard to find a year when Fatboy Slim isn’t out there bouncing around behind the DJ desk, his colorful shirt impossible to spot through the crowd as he walks between the big stages. Last year he closed the program with scenes in the hills of the Pilton valley, but he usually plays during the day at smaller venues. And from time to time similar spectacular events are interspersed with a club night like the one that was ending past four in the morning at the Roxy.
Eat, sleep, dance, repeat
Chamber spaces provide closer contact with the audience, concentrated energy, a sweaty floor and memories of the 90s, when electronic music in Britain became a social phenomenon and clubs became weekend sanctuaries. That’s exactly how it looks at Roxy now.
Fatboy Slim helped define the sound of the turn of the millennium. | Photo: Jan Pulkrábek / Bushman Media
The impression of the crowd is enhanced by the fans surrounding the DJ. The audience moving on the stage is a long-term feature of the most famous Prague club associated with dance music.
The event was sold out practically immediately after publication, in addition to the fame of the artist, the fact that such an evening may not be repeated contributed to this. Fatboy Slim played in the Czech capital for only the third time. He performed for the first time in 2001 at the Exhibition Center, last time five years ago at the Duplex club. In addition, he was a guest of two summer festivals outside of Prague. “Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat,” the audience repeats in unison at the end of the show. It’s about single from 2013, but the slogan captures a cycle that has been repeating itself on the dance floor at the Roxy on weekends since the mid-1990s. Half an hour is all it takes on Friday, and an above-average February day turns into a feverish one in the club.
The love of funk
Fatboy Slim’s breakthrough album You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby from 1998 evokes a “best of” when listened back. What a piece, it’s a hit. Even songs that were not released as singles have a captivating rhythm. The recording helped popularize the genre big beat and partly defined the sound of the turn of the millennium. The upbeat, playful sound acted as a promise of better days in the coming millennium.
These songs alone would be enough for at least an hour without any problems. But Fatboy Slim did not come to Roxy as a hitmaker, but as a club DJ and music enthusiast.
Fatboy Slim didn’t come to Roxy as a hitmaker. | Photo: Jan Pulkrábek / Bushman Media
The three-hour set consists mainly of contemporary tracks. He does not choose from the charts, but from news. They are united by a suffocating and repetitive beat, reminiscent of a seemingly never-ending song in which one composition flows seamlessly into the next. He plays his own hits rather in echoes, embedding their supporting parts in the rhythm, the audience gets smarter every time.
The house beat is complemented by unidentified undertones. They resemble the conversation of intoxicated bots returning from a hit or the mining of cryptocurrency paid in cosmopolitan bars. At other times, Fatboy Slim reflects on the global popularity of the genre reggaetonbefore crushing the Spanish-sung tune with a brutal, bass-heavy beat.
But if the Brit doesn’t deny something, it’s his love for funk. “Play that funky music, white boy / Play that funky music right,” sings the club enthusiastically remixu hit, which shot to the top of the American charts in September 1987.
On the screen behind the stage, a contrasting video projection in poisonous colors is running, smiling smileys slowly rise on the giant screen like bubbles in champagne infused with the drug LSD. The laughing emoticon is Fatboy Slim’s logo as well as a symbol of the British genre acid house, whose echoes cannot be overheard either. But Roxy herself provides the strongest visual impression.
The maintained art deco interiors of the former cinema, which opened here in 1927, are intersected by lasers, the hall is regularly shrouded in smoke, the broken ceiling is dotted with pulsating lights. In the hall under Prague’s Dlouha třída, the historical blends with the contemporary – just like in the compositions of the star of the evening. The tracks intersperse snippets of spoken language, so the show sometimes takes on a cinematic character. The call to “put your hands in the air” sounds perhaps too often, but the audience listens nonetheless.
Praise You, like most of Fatboy Slim’s hits, comes from the album You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, released in 1998. Photo: Jan Pulkrábek | Video: Skint Records
Back to punk
As the music blares incessantly, Fatboy Slim heckles the crowd, picking up a spray horn and “playing” it, sometimes with both hands. Not even the sound and lighting engineer’s station is immune to the absorbing atmosphere, where for some reason the audience sneaks in and sips their drinks. An Englishman brought a summer party on a Brighton beach to winter Prague.
In the last hour of the show, his own compositions appear more often, Praise You sounds in all sorts of mutations.
Big beat is especially suited to guitar mashups, i.e. mixing with other songs. Hit The Rockafeller Skank it gets raw and sex-appeal when Fatboy Slim into it he drinks Satisfaction od Rolling Stones.
Right Here, Right Now by Fatboy Slim has over 57 million views on YouTube alone. Photo: Jan Pulkrábek | Video: Skint Records
In the final to Right Here, Right Now plays the punk croon “hey ho, let’s go” from Blitzkrieg Bop by punk pioneers the Ramones. The combination can appear bold, surprising but not so much.
Fourteen-year-old Norman Cook’s passion for music was ignited by a Damned album brought home by his older brother. Subsequently, he began covering local concerts and drumming in punk groups. He has come a long way since then, but he shows the spontaneity of punk and his passion for music even during an exceptional show at the Roxy.
2024-02-25 16:41:10
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