It’s that time of the year when everybody becomes a DJ. Whether you’re ‘playing out’ in front of a crowd or simply trying to put together a floor-filling playlist for a Christmas or New Year’s Eve house party, the pressure is on to curate a suitably celebratory set of songs.
As a trailblazing ‘superstar DJ’, Norman Cook (AKA Fatboy Slim) knows this pressure all too well, and he’s one of several people who’ve been passing on the benefit of their years of experience to the hard-partying readers of The Guardian.
If you’re planning to take the DJing controls rather than just let a playlist play, Cook’s advice is to “narrow it down to 60 or 70 tunes that you think are going to be needed”. And, if all else fails, “just play something well known”.
“For me, if I really had to rescue a dancefloor I’d play Right Here, Right Now or Praise You,” says Cook. “They would be my get-out-of-jail records.”
Of course, it helps if you’ve got a couple of smash hits in your personal discography - both of the aforementioned records happen to come from Fatboy Slim's 1998 album You've Come A Long Way, Baby - but even if you don’t, having those emergency bangers in your locker is definitely a good idea.
“It is about getting people dancing, but also it’s unifying people,” says Cook of the DJ’s role. “The dancefloor is like an organism, and when it’s all working together, it’s lovely, but sometimes you lose the dancefloor: there’s sort of different pockets of people and they’re not really united. Or some people are dancing, some people aren’t, and it’s that feeling of bonding everybody together that you need to do, and recognition of a song that everybody likes is kind of that thing.”
In fact, if you’re playing a house party, Cook takes the view that “nothing is out of bounds” and that, when it comes to song selection, “all bets are off”.
“There is a fabulous drum’n’bass edit of Fairytale of New York that I might end a set with,” he admits. “I wouldn’t play a record like that on any other day.”
