Fatboy Slim 'Praise You'

Chart Peak: 1

YouTube

'Praise You' provided man of the moment Norman Cook with his first Number One single as Fatboy Slim... Norman was awarded the '99 Brit for Best British Dance Act - over ten years since he won his first Brit Award as a member of the Housemartins for Best British Newcomer.

Cook's only solo chart topper arrived, funnily enough, as the third single from his second album in this guise. It was one of those cases where it felt like a matter of time before he got a Number One anyway, such was the excitement around the album, and perhaps the record company even chose to hold back this crowd-pleasing single for an opportune time in the spring. It's certainly a song of broader appeal than 'The Rockafeller Skank' and 'Gangsta Trippin', both of which featured highly repetitive vocal samples. 'Praise You', by contrast, has a more conventional song structure and a full vocal, derived from Camille Yarborough's 'Take Yo' Praise', which most people would never have heard before. I'm not accusing Cook of anything here, though, it's not as if he pretended it was him singing; and in this case at least it's clear that he's acted out of affection for the source material, blending it with various other samples and reviving it for a wider and younger audience.

The other thing everybody remembers of this is of course the promo video, directed by and starring Spike Jonze. If anything it seems a little ahead of its time - it looks more at home on YouTube, where we're used to seeing videos shot in public without proper lighting, and where people publicly sharing their own interpretation of a popular song is commonplace. One of the actors who played a dancer posted a sort of making-of video although most of it seems to have been cribbed from a tacky BBC3 I Love 1999 segment. Towards the end there's a brief excerpt of future Cook collaborator David Byrne showing his autocue-reading skills, which are as convincing as you'd expect.

To tell the truth, I'd got a bit tired of this song because it was so ubiquitous for so long, and these days I'm as likely to listen to the flipside 'Sho Nuff', but I still have fundamental affection for this record and it's here that Disc 2 starts to get good.

Also appearing on: Now 40, 41, 43
Available on: Cruel Intentions

Fatboy Slim 'The Rockafeller Skank'

Chart Peak: 6

YouTube

It's slightly hard to imagine now that there was ever a time when this record seemed unfamiliar enough to necessitate that little sticker on the cover associating it with the lyric "Right about now, funk soul brother". This wasn't quite the first Fatboy Slim single to hit the Top 40 (a rerelease of 'Everybody Needs A 303' had done that late in 1997) but as the sleevenote points out, this built on the "incredible success of his Cornershop and Wildchild remixes" (both of which turned up on Now 39) to become "one of the summer's hottest tunes". Even the peak position of 6 seems to understate its popularity somewhat, as it was released in the same week when the football songs in the previous two posts and the official tournament song by Dario G were all new entries to the Top 5.

Indeed, this was one of the most ubiquitous tracks in the second half of 1998, not only because it was able to survive England's exit from the tournament but also because it managed to attract so many audiences; catchy enough for kids, energetic enough for clubbers, funky enough for hip-hop fans and melodic enough for the general pop audience. The so-called big beat scene was a massive crossover to the indie market too, possibly because so many of the people involved were ex-members of indie bands anyway... Norman Cook certainly was, and yet for all his past success in so many forms, this set the stage for Fatboy Slim to become arguably his most consistently successful alias; it was only the first of four Top 10 singles from the album You've Come A Long Way Baby, which is trailed on the single cover under the presumed working title Let's Hear It For The Little Guy. If you're wondering why all the backgound digressions here, it's because I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to listen to it again. That's not say that I don't like the record, indeed I think it's excellent and I'm still slightly in awe of the imagination that it took to make it. But it's a record that most of anywhere near my age have heard A LOT and given its inherantly repetitive nature it's not as easy to enjoy as it should be. Sorry Norm.

Also appearing on: Now 41, 42, 43
Available on: Why Try Harder: the Greatest Hits