It’s hard to imagine Norman Cook, better known to the world as Fatboy Slim, ever just barely scraping by, but the man behind Rockafeller Skank has a story that proves even legends have humble moments. In a recent interview on the Retro Hour podcast, Cook opened up about a decidedly weird moment in his early career: composing music for a Smurfs video game.
'Basically, I was absolutely brassic,' he says. Coming off a difficult divorce and a quiet stretch after Beats International, Cook found himself in a precarious financial position. 'I was one PPL check away from having to declare myself bankrupt,' he said. In those months, even someone of his pedigree had to make purely practical choices.
One of those choices was accepting a small offer to demo music for a Smurfs game. 'They said, ‘Do you want to write the music for a Smurfs game? We’ll pay you £1,000 to demo it.’ I was like, I need that thousand pounds,' Cook says. 'I honestly don’t think [the Smurfs track] got used,' he added, laughing. 'I just demoed up a load of rubbish hoping that I wouldn’t get the job.'
Cook also shared how he supplemented his income by selling a sample CD called Skip to My Loops, another project he calls “not particularly proud of,” but necessary to pay bills. Even at the height of creativity and later fame, survival sometimes dictated unusual decisions.
Throughout the interview, Cook reflected on his career-long love affair with technology and music-making. Despite being a self-described technophobe, he mastered the Atari ST and samplers like the Akai S950, building his signature sound in a home studio long before laptops made home production common.
Fatboy Slim’s biggest hits defined the 'big beat' era of the late ’90s and early 2000s, turning him into a global household name. Tracks like The Rockafeller Skank, Praise You, and Weapon of Choice became iconic not just for their infectious beats and clever samples, but for their genre-blending creativity that fused funk, hip-hop, and electronic music. These songs served up memorable videos, most famously Christopher Walken dancing in Weapon of Choice. That's about as far from a Smurf as it's possible to get.
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