Day 186: Fatboy Slim – You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
I’ve written about Fatboy Slim, when I was writing about his previous band, the Housemartins. After they disbanded in the late ‘80s, Fatboy Slim, or Norman Cook, moved to Brighton to try his hand at dance music full-time. He’d DJ’d since he was 15 and he grew sick of playing what he called "white English pop" with the Housemartins and wanted to pivot to something he was more interested in.
Album cover courtesy of Skint Records
Released in 1998, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby is Cook’s, or Slim’s (Fatboy’s?) second album. It was a seminal piece of work in the breakbeat genre where he was making a name for himself, combining breakbeats with samples and loops from various audio clips and records he’d collected over the years, combining them like a collage:
I love the idea of musical collage where you’ve taken so many tiny little bits that the vocal is the only thing you have to clear and everything else is fragmented so it’s unrecognisable … For me, there was a tremendous amount of excitement about what you could get away with and how much you could pervert things. And to see how you could just recycle records that sold 15 copies when they came out, but find that one little bit of magic in them and turn it into a hit.
If there’s one album you could say has no skips, it’s this one. It was another one of those albums where you think you know the hits but you’ve heard more than you think you have, as a great deal of the album has lived on. The often short and repetitive vocal parts(“Fatboy Slim is fucking in heaven”, etc) with the cut-and-paste audio tracks creates something that’s almost a bit hypnotic and that’ll almost certainly make your day better if you listen to it.
The only thing I don’t like about it is the cover. He chose a photo of a random guy wearing a t-shirt that says "I’M #1 SO WHY TRY HARDER" and used it for the cover without the guy’s knowledge or consent. I think I’ve been reading too much about this panopticon surveillance hellscape we’re currently living in, but I’m just uncomfortable thinking that any minute you’re outside, someone could snap a photo of you that’s then seen by millions because they thought you look funny. But credit to Cook, he has been trying to retroactively find the guy so that he can pay him – a little too late, but I guess it’s something.
Very, very solid album, he could have just packed it in right then and there after putting it out, having several songs from it become somewhat of a modern classic. It’s a 9/10. Now if someone could please clarify if he meant that he’s actually bumping uglies in heaven or if he just meant that he’s having a nice time, because I’d like to know.