Fatboy Slim shared a heartbreaking admission as 2024 drew to a close, as he addressed the future of his career as a DJ and producer.
The 61-year-old artist, real name Norman Cook, said he believed he had lost his passion for making new music, which was preventing him from working on another album.
“The thing is, you can’t make music unless you’re absolutely passionate about it and it drives you from the moment you wake up in the morning,” he told The Sun’s Bizarre column.
“I just don’t seem to feel like that anymore. I feel like that about DJing and about putting on [events], but I’ve kind of lost my passion for making music.”
Cook, who rose to fame in the mid-Nineties with his debut Better Living Through Chemistry and its follow-up, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, has not released an album since 2004’s Palookaville.
“For five years, I tried to beat myself up about it and go, ‘You should be doing this,’” he said. “But then I thought, “Well, everybody likes my DJing and I enjoy that more, so I’ll do that.’”
However, he said he hoped that “one day the passion will come back”.
Cook, who is booked to headline Kendal Calling and Latitude Festival in 2025, previously said in a 2019 interview with NME that it was unlikely he would ever release another album.
“If I ever got around to making another Fatboy Slim album it’ll probably be in a time when albums are completely redundant as a format,” he said.
“So, I will probably end up making more music and regain my love for producing and being an artist but it probably won’t be an album.”
Earlier this week, Cook’s son Woody, whom he shares with ex-wife Zoe Ball, told his followers on Instagram that the DJ’s mother Ros had died on Christmas Day.
“Ups and downs of the year. My Granny Ros passed away on Christmas Day,” he wrote. “She was an amazing woman and ‘was ready to start her next life’. That kind of optimism and mentality really inspires me.”
Woody, 24, added that “losing two grandparents this year has really made me grow and made me focus a-lot more on family”.
Radio presenter Ball, who quit her longtime presenting slot on BBC Radio 2’s breakfast show in December, lost her own mother Julia eight months ago.
