Norman Cook - better known as Fatboy Slim - is a master of sampling: sourcing, slicing, processing and layering distinctive elements of classic funk and soul samples, he put together anthems that helped to bridge the gap between underground club culture and mainstream pop music in the ‘90s.
Cook has opened up about his approach to sampling in his early days in an interview with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt for the Rockonteurs podcast, talking about the difficulties of sampling copyrighted music in a time when the ethics and legalities of the practice had yet to be ironed out.
“When sampling first came out, there was no mechanism to do it,” Cook says, recalling the success he found with the song Dub Be Good To me, which he recorded with the group Beats International in 1990 before the song hit No 1 in the UK charts. The track sampled the bassline from The Clash’s Guns of Brixton - a sample that Cook hadn’t cleared with the band or their label.
Cook recalls going to see Big Audio Dynamite, a band fronted by The Clash’s Mick Jones, and realizing the band were using Dub Be Good To Me during the introduction to the show. “I went to see Big Audio Dynamite, and they walked on to that tune,” he says. “They played it as their walk-on music, so I was thinking, well… Mick’s alright with it.”
Somebody probably at some point said, should we talk to The Clash about that sample?
“Somebody probably at some point said, should we talk to The Clash about that sample? We didn’t know how big a hit it would be,” he continues. “But I just said, ‘they’re alright with it, because Mick played it’ - he’s heard it, and he never said anything… but I didn’t realize that [Clash bassist] Paul Simonon, that was his only writing credit. When it got to number one, he came and asked for some money, but it was alright.”
Cook says that he believes there’s an ethical difference between lifting an entire hook from a song, or sampling a single sound, such as a drum hit or a guitar chord. “My morals with sampling have always been: if it’s a hook, or I feel like I’ve taken their idea, then I would always try and pay for it,” he says. “But if it was just a sound - if I had to clear every snare drum, every guitar chord…”
“It was like the Wild West,” Cook says of sampling’s early days. “You didn’t know what you can get away with. So many of us had been putting out records for years, but no one really cared or worried about it because they weren’t hits… but when there’s money around, all of a sudden there’s lawyers, and over the next ten years, it went completely the other way.”
“My record company and my management absolutely hated it, but I kind of liked the thrill of the chase,” Cook admits. “On every record there would be like, 10 samples, and we would clear the two that I thought needed to be cleared, and then we would wing it on the other eight.”
Fatboy Slim is busy promoting his latest single, Role Model, which is out now on Southern Fried Records.
