Norman Cook grew up obsessed with records and came of age during punk. He has repeatedly described punk less as a musical template than as permission to break rules — a useful clue to a later production style built from cheeky samples, obvious hooks and ideas respectable musicians might have considered too crude.

He moved to Brighton as a student in the early 1980s partly because of the city’s nightlife. DJing became as important as playing in bands, and Brighton’s mixture of soul, funk, indie, later acid house and record-shop culture gave him a musical identity broader than any one genre.

Cook joined The Housemartins on bass in 1985, entering mainstream pop through an indie band before electronic dance music became his central work. After the band split he formed Beats International, whose Dub Be Good To Me reached UK No.1 in 1990 by combining SOS Band vocals with the bassline from The Clash’s Guns of Brixton. The sample-collision principle was already there.

Other projects followed: Freak Power, Pizzaman, Mighty Dub Katz and more. Some were chart-friendly; others were deliberately clubby. Cook’s career in this period is best understood as a laboratory for aliases — each name allowed a different tempo, label or idea without the baggage of the previous one.

His acid-house conversion in the early 1990s pulled him further into club production. In Brighton he worked around Rounder Records and the Loaded label network. Damian Harris, who had taken Cook’s old job at Rounder, developed the Skint imprint from the same local ecosystem.

The Fatboy Slim name arrived in the mid-1990s. Early Skint releases and the album Better Living Through Chemistry established a sound that soon became labelled big beat: hip-hop breaks, acid lines, funk samples, rock attitude and house pacing, designed to make sense both in a club and in a much larger room.

But the label came after the behaviour. At the Big Beat Boutique in Brighton, Cook and the people around Skint were simply playing records that broke the normal club rules — house beside hip hop, rock riffs beside acid lines, whatever carried enough rhythm to work. The regular crowd trusted the residents enough to let them get away with it. Only later did the press turn the club name into a genre name.

The 1996 BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix is a brilliant snapshot of that transition. Norman’s selections move through house, funk, breaks, hip hop and his own early Fatboy Slim material without behaving like a genre exercise. The set sounds like the record box behind the Big Beat Boutique.

That refusal to pick one tribe is why the sound connected with ravers who had already lived through acid house, hardcore, indie dance and hip hop rubbing shoulders in the same few years. The method was familiar even when the scale got bigger: find the bit everyone recognises, twist it, slam a break underneath it and give the room a reason to grin.

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby in 1998 turned the project global. The Rockafeller Skank, Gangster Trippin, Right Here, Right Now and Praise You made Fatboy Slim one of the rare dance producers able to dominate pop radio without smoothing away the collage technique.

Praise You also produced one of the era’s defining videos when Spike Jonze staged the Torrance Community Dance Group’s deliberately awkward public performance. The low-budget visual matched the music perfectly: familiar material reassembled until it felt new and a little ridiculous.

The Big Beat Boutique then scaled Brighton club culture into something much bigger. The second Brighton Beach event in 2002 drew a crowd far beyond expectations and became part triumph, part warning about the logistics of free mass gatherings. Cook has spoken openly about the chaos around that day as well as its cultural importance.

Unlike many 1990s dance stars, Fatboy Slim remained primarily a DJ after the peak studio-hit years. Sobriety changed the personal side of touring, but the onstage character survived. His official Mixcloud archive shows a working DJ still rebuilding old hooks inside new house and techno rather than presenting a heritage greatest-hits show.

The result is a uniquely British route through dance culture: indie bass player, sample-pop producer, Brighton house head, big-beat pioneer and mass-event DJ. The names changed, but the method stayed recognisable — find the bit of a record that makes people grin and make it enormous.