Fatboy at the Summit
Somewhere in the Austrian mountains during Volvo Snowbombing 2011, Fatboy Slim played a set in an actual igloo. I got to talk to him afterwards on a sunny terrace, asking the kinds of questions you ask someone who’s been on the road forever and has somehow found a way to keep making it work.
He looked spent in the way DJs do after a set—not from the music itself but from the noise and the bodies and the heat you have to generate for people who’ve been drinking since morning. The igloo gig had been packed with English tourists who wanted exactly what he gave them: party music at volume, the kind of thing that makes you move before your brain catches up. He laughed about it, said a good DJ reads the room and gives people what they’re actually asking for, not what you think they should want. Fair enough.
What struck me was that after all that, after the sweat and the noise and the crowd jumping around him, he’d gone back to his hotel room and made himself a hot cocoa. Sat there alone. Because touring isn’t the romance of it—the sunlit terrace, the mountain setting, the igloo—it’s the repetition. Gig, rest, travel, gig. He’d been in Chile and Brazil and was headed to Slovenia and Indonesia. The world as a series of airports and festival sites. He mentioned a baby at home, said he tries to be there during the week, that it matters to him. You could hear the actual care in it, not the performer’s care but something real underneath.
He’d tried to get back to Germany but had a Berlin Festival date pulled when the police shut the whole thing down. He said he loves the country. You hear that enough times from touring musicians that it becomes background noise, but there was something genuine in the frustration—not at the cops, just at the interruption of the pattern, the missed connection. He wasn’t sure when he’d make it back.
As for new music, he wasn’t producing much at the moment. Said the right idea has to collide with the right time and he wasn’t there yet. Fair enough. Some people need the pressure of a deadline. Some people need the opposite—permission to wait for something that actually excites them. Hard to tell which Fatboy Slim was, but he seemed okay with not knowing.