Fatboy Slim says he felt paralysed at prospect of DJing sober after rehab | Fatboy Slim
Fatboy Slim has said he feels paralyzed and “rigid with fear” at the prospect of DJing sober after spending time in rehab to deal with alcohol addiction.
The artist, whose real name is Norman Cook, described his alcoholism as a parasite during an appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs program with Lauren Laverne, and said that getting sober was “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done”.
He said he was asked to find a solution to his problem after his wife, Zoe Ball, who was a radio DJ at the time, said she would leave him if he did not stop drinking. “This was my waking moment. Tons of people had yelled at me before, but in the end it was whispered very quietly.
“Addiction is such a weird disease, it’s like a parasite, it’s self-protective. It knows if you let go you won’t have anywhere to live anymore, so it will do things to you to keep you.”
“Probably the last year I was drinking, I wasn’t enjoying myself very much and things were starting to go south in my life.”
He checked into a rehab facility in 2009 and has been sober for almost 15 years since then. While in rehab, he realized he wanted help “just in time.”
When asked if quitting smoking was easy, he said: “No, absolutely not. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done… I couldn’t do it without going to rehab. I needed someone to hit me on the head for a month. You know, ‘you’re going to die and you’re going to be miserable if you don’t stop doing this’.”
He said it took some time for the anxiety he felt when he returned to the stage to perform sober to subside. “For the first five shows, I was so paralyzed with fear that I couldn’t dance and I couldn’t enjoy it. I was like, ‘What are you actually doing? Why are you going to play that record next? And why are they going to react to it?'”
He said a “good night in Japan” helped him overcome his fears as the crowd was “really excited” and he realized his job was to make the crowd happy. “Everything fell into place,” he said.
Cook, who performed in Housemartins with Paul Heaton, who would later form Beautiful South, came to prominence in the 1990s as Fatboy Slim. He released a string of club hits including Praise You, The Rockafeller Skank and Right Here, Right Now.
It received six Grammy nominations and won the 2002 Best Music Video award for Weapon Of Choice, which starred Hollywood actor Christopher Walken dancing in a deserted hotel lobby.
The full Desert Island Discs episode can be heard on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from 10am on Sunday.
