Fatboy Slim

Cook found the hook for his signature song by accident, digging through a Camden Market bootleg stall for scraps of a cappella soul. What stopped him was Camille Yarbrough's 1975 vocal from 'Take Yo' Praise' — 'her vocal just had a beautiful quality to it,' he said, 'affirmative and uplifting.' He looped it over a stray piano riff until, he said, 'the sum total of the parts became a third song.'

listen: upstream & heresource: Sound on Sound — Classic Tracks ↗share

1975

Take Yo' PraiseCamille Yarbrough

→↓

1999

Praise YouFatboy Slim

listen forCue up Yarbrough's original a cappella verse, its slow, spoken-sung cadence built for call and response, then hear 'Praise You' time-stretch and loop the same phrase into a stuttering hiccup — 'praise you like I should-d-d-d-d' — riding a piano sample so worn and off-tempo you can hear studio chatter bleeding through underneath it, a rehearsal tape repurposed as a hit single's backbone.

Cook was a teenage DJ who'd never thought of it as a job when a stray copy of Grandmaster Flash's turntablist showcase rewired his ambitions. 'A pivotal record in my development from wanting to be in a pop band to wanting to be a creative DJ,' he told the BBC's Desert Island Discs, recalling how Flash was 'making a collage, playing one tune on top of another, cutting between two really quickly. It just blew my mind.' That collage instinct became the whole method Cook would later call big beat.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1981

Adventures on the Wheels of SteelGrandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

→↓

1998

The Rockafeller SkankFatboy Slim

listen forOn 'Adventures on the Wheels of Steel,' listen to how Flash slices between several different records mid-beat, turning turntable cuts and scratches into the track's only instrument — no drum machine, no bassline, just vinyl against vinyl. 'The Rockafeller Skank' plays the sampler-era version of the same trick, chopping a rapper's spoken intro into stuttering syllables — 'funky beats, funky beats' — until the edit itself becomes the hook.

Cook was a teenage disco skeptic — 'we thought disco was for wimps back then,' he admitted — until Donna Summer's 1977 single, built on producer Giorgio Moroder's relentless sequenced bassline, upended him: 'that record, it was futuristic, hypnotic. I'd never heard anything like it before.' It was his first real brush with electronic music, years before he owned a Roland TB-303 himself, and that machine-pulse thrill resurfaces in the gear-worship of his own debut single.

listen: upstream & heresource: CHUNES — Fatboy Slim ↗share

1977

I Feel LoveDonna Summer

→↓

1996

Everybody Needs a 303Fatboy Slim

listen forListen to the hypnotic, unbroken throb of Moroder's synth bassline on 'I Feel Love' — one note, relentlessly sequenced, with almost nothing else moving under Summer's voice for minutes at a stretch. 'Everybody Needs a 303' chases that same machine-pulse high with a squelching Roland TB-303 line, the whole track built to showcase one piece of gear the way Moroder's synth carries his.