I’ve been wanting to share this track for ages but it only existed on CD that I’ve now finally gotten out of storage.
21 years ago, I started a band called Candungo Burro (Idiot Donkey) with Bo Weaver as the producer/synth/samples guy on stage and it was mostly industrial disco pop.
Through collaborating, we came up with some mad tracks that were just bonkers and so much hilarity to make. We had looked up to Fatboy Slim for quite a while but eventually realised his style was incredibly formulaic and easily repeated. So when we heard the track ‘Fatboy Slim is Fxxking in Heaven’, we knew what we had to do.
This track basically wrote itself, containing my vocal ‘Fatboy Slim is Fxxking a Sheep’ and we chose the ingenious title ‘Cook Norman’ for the track (Fatboy Slim’s real name is Norman Cook)
We used to go clubbing at Room in Hull, often twice a week for the regular indie/rock/dance nights and got a friend who was a DJ to play the track one night.
Because Fatboy Slim was at the height of his popularity and the main vocal hook repeated his name, we could only surmise that people thought it was a new track of his and promptly filled the dancefloor. We were almost dying with laughter stood in the middle of the dancefloor surrounded by peeps joining us in dancing to our track. There’s a breakdown section that pans from left speaker to right and this was when we realised the club set up was split with right speaker by the DJ booth and left at the other side of the dancefloor across the room, so we really got the benefit of that panning sequence.
Later that year, we were at Glastonbury and Bo and my brother ended up in the artists’ camping area whilst I was off having a nap and they met Fat boy Slim with Zoe Ball at his backstage winnebago. When they told me this I was gushing, “what did he think about the track?”, I asked.
Apparently they were too polite to tell him about it, because, and this thought had never occurred to me – with his wife Zoe Ball being there, in that context, they said: she was the sheep!
I miss those days making bonkers dance music, but the story of this track is probably the best.
Cook Norman was a b-side on our ‘Only Not’ ep, and the second b-side was a ridiculous yet bouncy remix of one of my old 4 track tunes called Licking Zed which Bo and I wrote in an afternoon, with friends filling in on vocals for a comedic choir section. This too has been dragged from the vaults:
Annabel Strange 