He might be a hero to a new generation of DJs and producers, but Norman Cook (AKA Fatboy Slim) has revealed that he couldn’t face the prospect of working with current electronic musician du jour, Fred Again.
Speaking to Rebecca Judd on Apple Music 1, Cook said: "Everybody was trying to get us to work together. I was just going, 'I can't be in the same room as him.' I wouldn't know where to start because of what he's doing with technology.”
Cook is known for being slow to embrace new working methods, continuing to use his Atari ST-based setup well into this century. And, even when he did slim things down and switched to a modern laptop, he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it.
"It wasn't my idea at all," he told Future Music in 2012. “I was completely happy working with the Atari and the Akais, but everybody around me kept saying, 'Norm, you can't carry on like this'. I suppose I was bullied into it by my management. They just kept pointing out all the positives of Ableton. The way you can lash bits of songs together. I think I was scared of changing things, just in case it didn't work as well as what I was used to."
And, sure enough, once Cook had made the switch, he still dipped his creative toe back in retro tech waters from time to time.
"I switched on the laptop, looked at the screen for several hours and then thought, 'Nah, let's go upstairs,’” he said of one particular session. “I hadn't switched on the Atari for months, but it felt great. I dug out my floppy disks, dusted everything down and just started playing loads of samples."
Fred Again, of course, is something of a music tech wizard, and Cook admits that this puts him in a different place.
"I'm old school, I'm OG and I'm used to just playing records with the cross fader and maybe using a sample a bit, but he's taking it to the next level,” he says. “I don't feel like I'm in the same conversation as him.
"I would sit there looking at him in awe, going, 'How the hell did you do that?""
Cook adds that, while he is still making music - he has a new single called Bus Stop Please on the way - his motivation to release it isn’t as strong as it once was.
"I'm not that driven to put records out these days and I think I've kind of lost my nerve a bit, but also I'm not churning 'em out like I used to,” he says.
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