One of the biggest names in the 'Big Beat' revolution that swept global music charts in the late '90s and early 2000s, Fatboy Slim – also known as Norman Cook – has recently sat down for a chat with The Retro Hour Podcast, and he reveals he's actually something of a Luddite when it comes to video games and technology in general.
Despite the fact that he famously used an Atari ST to create some of his biggest hits, Cook explains that he "knows nothing about video games" and "very little about technology. It's kind of weird because of the music I make and what I do for a living. People assume that I'm a right tech geek and I'm up on everything."
Like many artists who grew to fame during the arrival of the 32-bit PlayStation, Cook's music was used in video games, with perhaps the most famous example being The Rockafeller Skank in FIFA 98:
"For ages, tons of people would go, 'oh yeah, FIFA 98' to me, like I understood what the hell they were on. It was about six months of like, 'why do people say FIFA 98 to me.' And they're like, oh, Rockafeller Skank was on FIFA 98. When you played FIFA 98, you heard [it] over and over again whenever you played it.
For them, that was their entry point to me because they were too young to be in nightclubs. But I don't remember ever being asked, do you wanna be in this video game? I probably said, yeah, whatever."
Cook's relationship with video games didn't end there, but the next time he was asked to collaborate, his circumstances were somewhat different:
"I was absolutely brassic [broke]. I had a nasty divorce, which I couldn't afford to pay for, and I was skint... I didn't make any decent music, and I wasn't getting paid for anything.
I had debts, and I was one PPL cheque away from having to declare myself bankrupt. And it's, what do you do? The two things I did, which I'm sort of ashamed about, but I had to do it - I just got offered this Smurfs game. 'Do you want to write the music for a Smurfs game? We'll pay you a thousand pounds to demo it.'
And I was like, 'I need that thousand pounds.' So I wrote some music. I don't think it ever got used. I used that as a thing of how low I'd stoop... there are things that I'm not particularly proud of.
Somebody the other day got in touch and said, 'I read about your Smurfs thing, I played every version of the Smurfs game to find out which one it was.' I honestly don't think it got used. I just demoed up a load of rubbish, hoping that I wouldn't get the job. I needed a thousand pounds! The fact that I was floundering musically at that point anyway, and I deliberately did a bad job because I didn't want to be on a video game. So it is probably not my worst, [but] not my best work. Even if it still exists somewhere."