The year is 1998. Techno music has long made its way from Detroit all across the Atlantic to fill European clubs and streets with strange, beautiful electronic noises. Machines have taken over, in everyday life, but also in music.
Four years ago, Kurt Cobain left a heart-shaped hole in many of us. With a bang and no one to blame, white guy guitar music ended overnight. We drowned our sorrows in machine-made sounds, caught between Bristol Trip Hop and The Prodigy’s ElectroPunk. For the first time since The Beatles and The Stones, pop music was British again, and it was dangerous and expressive and mesmerizing.
Suddenly, white guy guitar music was back, at least for the media. Britpop had arrived and left some of us dazed and confused, asking the wrong questions at the wrong time. What is a “Wonderwall” and where do I get one? Even before Madonna killed “American Pie,” it was the day the music died. We needed a savoir, and in his basement beneath the bright beaches of Brighton, we found Norman Cook. He invented his own version of time travel and subsequently became the oxymoronic Fatboy Slim, Fat enough to be a reminder that obvious is harder than subtle, Slim enough to fit through the cracks of time and space and collect sonic adventures from dusty thrift stores all across the country. Suddenly, the future and the futuristic past were Right Here, Right Now.
Before he ascended to superstardom, Cook was a bass player in The Housemartins when his musical career unexpectedly peaked as a singer, as he a-cappellaed his way through “Caravan of Love,” the band’s biggest hit. Trading lyrics for soundscapes as the expressive core of his music, he became a DJ and quickly followed a formula made fashionable by Manchester’s The Chemical Brothers: Big Beat, dance music making the indie crossover at its most accessible point, a pop hook on a hip hop beat with an acid house sensibility.
Fatboy Slim did not want to be Indie. He created hooks as flamboyant as a dance-world denizen possibly can. After all, when moving through sonic space, we move best in multiples of four. For his tracks, Cook relies on sampling, but not the kind of megaplundermorphonemiclonic mayhem of John Oswalt’s Plexure. Cook’s plundering exposes him as a record geek with extensive knowledge and eclectic taste, a real rhythmatician. He is armed with a 1985 Atari ST, a machine so outdated even in 1998 that its mere existence in Cook’s basement feels like an affirmation that time travel really exists. By chopping up vinyl tracks into floppy-disk-sized chunks, he summons American artists of the 1970s, calling them over through a four-dimensional sonic space, reincarnating them in a futurhythmic machine from the past. “Praise You” is a prime example of his meticulous attention to detail.
As the song begins, the piano sample is the first sound to arrive in the future. Recorded in 1973 in Santa Monica, it is not a song; Barely a song idea; Mostly some guys having fun before a recording session. Eight minutes of hanging out in the studio, before the real work starts. Chatting, tuning, warming up. Balance and Rehearsal. The room is crowded, way too crowded for a Fat man to stay unnoticed. Luckily, he is Slim enough to hide. At two minutes and fourty seconds, a chord progression appears out of nowhere. Left channel microphone guy, whoever he is, hums the chords, and the pianist plays along. F#, C#, G#. Someone comments underneath, incomprehensible. He is there, but also not there. For a brief moment in this chaotic environment, accompanied by the warm familiar crackle of a vinyl record played once too often, only this piano matters. Three chords and the truth. In this instant, a classic hook line is born. The time-travelling man grabs it and sends it to the future.
In 1975, two years after the piano sample sees the light of day, Camille Yarbrough starts her strenuous journey to the Brighton basement. Yarbrough is a street poetess, a rapper before there were rappers, setting the scene for Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill alike, an empowering vision of a black woman spreading her message on her first and only album, The Iron Pot Cooker. Its scarce instrumentation balances the songs between funk and R&B, but the time traveler is only interested in her voice. On the fourth track, “Take Yo’ Praise,” it is finally up for grabs. An a-cappella opening is all it takes for the seasoned veteran of a-cappella smash hits. The words she sings do not matter much. For the traveler, her voice, its timbre, its fullness, its rough smoothness, is just another cog in the mix. He invites her over, and twenty-three years later, right after the hook line repeats for a fourth time, she finally arrives, fifteen bars into the song. She hurries in on the preceding upbeat and stays there for all her lines, as hook and vocals share a verse of syncopated cross beats.
Percussion and bass line join, only getting a shortened introduction of eight bars each. This is the sample with the longest journey, at least for now. Recorded in 1971 by Rare Earth, this first all-white band signed to Motown feels out of its own time already. The sample stems from a cover of Ray Charles’ classic What’d I Say. Congas and cowbells add a Caribbean lightness to “Praise You.”
Taking over bass duties himself, Norman Cook sheds the Slim Fatboy suit and becomes a Housemartin again, circling around the chords’ base notes without adding too much fuzz. This might be his party, but he is an obliging host.
A short build up follows, as quarter notes make way for eighths and sixteenths while Yarbrough’s last sung phoneme is stretched out and repeated, turning her singing into a mono-melismatic stuttering, the sonic version of a document unsuccessfully printed a gazillion times only to spill out of the overwhelmed printer all at once. The crescendo finally gives way to the Big Beat as the second verse starts.
A twangy funky surf guitar riff, ripped straight out of a Mickey Mouse Disco compilation, is sent to the future. It is better suited for a sunny nineties Brighton beach day than a sticky seventies Burbank recording studio anyway. It joins a full-on rock drum break beat, courtesy of the 1976 song “Running Back to Me” by Tom Fogerty. Finally, the gang’s all here, the rhythmachine is up and running. Even though Mickey Mouse and John Fogerty’s little brother seem to be the star guests, this remains Camille Yarbrough’s show. She quickly recovers from her terrible stutter and takes the reigns again, as she repeats her Techno lament to a full band backdrop.
The song reaches a kind of chorus, even though there is not much more to reach. Yarbrough’s vocals are condensed to a Mantra, accompanied by herself in a higher octave repeated four times, creating her own version of a call and response.
It is breakdown time, and a special guest appears: Steve Miller. Arriving all the way from 1968, the space cowboy some people call Maurice sends a sampled keyboard interlude in D#7 thirty years into the future, a much needed break, albeit a short one. After only eight bars, drums and funk guitar return and soon, we are back in the original key, bouncing in fours with the hypnotizing piano hook line, back in chorus formation. Suddenly, the drop. There is no time to waste here, this is a pop radio single after all, and Wonderwall’s radio edit is less than four minutes long. Competition is tough.
We are back where we started. Vocals, the hook line, percussion. Yarbrough’s words become syllables, syllables again disintegrate into phonemes. The final crescendo, as the funky guitar distorts into another dimension, turning into an electro-funk synthesizer, a laser cannon reminiscent of a galaxy far, far away. Suddenly, it’s all over. A single piano note echo-loop-fades into the distance.
The year is 2002. Fatboy Slim has used his time machine time and time again to great success. His Brighton basement is crowded with time travelers eagerly waiting for their 15 minutes of retrofuturistic fame. Oasis are in shambles, on the verge of a breakup. Liam Gallagher hates to sing “Wonderwall,” so they hardly play it anymore.
Norman Cook sends an invitation to a free outdoor gig at Brighton beach into the ether. 60,000 people are expected to attend. When Fatboy Slim and his fellow time travelers finally take the stage, a quarter million people have shown up. It is the biggest single day event crowd in British music history.
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