No Rain

Electronic dance music's natural habitat is the nightclub, rave or festival, but, fresh from his cameo in the London Olympic Games closing ceremony, Brit DJ Fatboy Slim (aka Norman Cook) is bringing his Big Beach Bootique to cinemas. And you'll be raving in the aisles. 

Originally the big beat pioneer planned to “document” the fifth of his famous Brighton parties, and first in the seaside resort's new football stadium, exclusively for DVD. He shot the second of June's two spectacles. “It's not the biggest crowd I've ever played to, but it's the biggest production – all bells and whistles,” Cook says. It was then suggested that his concert film would suit the big screen, amid surging demand for 'event' cinema. Cook's cohorts The Chemical Brothers showed their Don't Think in 600 theatres internationally. His is going to 800. “But I suspect that next year the Swedes will do it and they'll be in 2000 screens worldwide,” he suggests ruefully. 

Fatboy Slim: Live From The Big Beach Bootique will show on one night only, Friday 31 August, globally. “The idea is that if we get everyone to watch it at once on the same night, we get some kind of vibe like it's a gig. Obviously, it's not the sort of film that you'd go to the Tuesday afternoon matinee of [laughs]. The idea is to get everybody together at once - they maybe have a few drinks before they go in - and [you get] as close to recreating the show as you can. I suppose it's the nearest you can get without actually being there.”

Cook did have qualms about moving his festival, last held in 2008 on Brighton Beach, to Falmer Stadium (or The AMEX). Partygoers could be put off by the prospect of “a cattle shed”. “But,” he says, “it's such a beautiful stadium.” The AMEX has superior facilities and, crucially, allows for greater crowd control. “It was a lot more relaxed for me 'cause some of the ones on the beach I was throwing, I was shitting in my pants. There was one where a quarter of a million people turned up. The police were saying to me, 'People will die tonight.' They said, 'It won't necessarily be your fault, but statistically you've got 250,000 drunk people on the streets – people are gonna die.' Then we did one on New Year's Day and the weather absolutely pissed down on us and everyone was soaked – not cold, but soaked. I was getting electrocuted. So compared to the ones I'd done on the beach, this one was a stroll in the park.”

And The AMEX is a more environmentally sustainable choice. Cook previously had to fork out a small fortune to clean up the shingle beach, post-party. “It took a team of fifty people a week to sift through all the pebbles and get all the muck out of it.” Coincidentally, Cook himself lives on Brighton's seafront with his wife, media personality Zoë Ball, and their children. Arriving on the South Coast from Surrey as a uni student in the '80s, he was already DJing there prior to joining the indie-pop group The Housemartins as bassist. “Of course, while we were taking the broken glass out of the pebbles, we were finding Victorian broken glass and bits from the '30s and the '40s,” Cook continues. “The beach has never been as clean as it was after we did that!” Might this model citizen have called in Time Team's archaeologists? “Yeah,” he replies laconically, “it was mainly broken glass.”