Fatboy Slim remembers having Paul McCartney as a neighbour: “He’s like the dad I always wanted”

Fatboy Slim has shared an anecdote from his time living next door to Paul McCartney, joking that it was “bizarre” because of his fandom for The Beatles.

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Slim (aka Norman Cook) recently caught up with NME to appear in the column Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?! For the chat, he was quizzed on various happenings from throughout his own career – he forgot that Arctic Monkeys covered ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ at their first-ever gig, and that he produced the Blur song ‘Gene By Gene’, but did correctly recall that he once snorted cocaine off the London-to-Brighton train line.

McCartney came up in a conversation about Cook’s infamous 2002 gig at Brighton Beach, where he performed for over 250,000 concertgoers. The show itself drew controversy after one attendee died, more than 100 more were injured, and several were rescued unconscious from the seashore. Cook was dragged by tabloids in the show’s wake, and, as he noted to NME, received some choice advice from McCartney as a result.

“He told me to leave the country – that’s what he’d do when things got on top of him,” Cook said. “It’s always bizarre having Paul McCartney as a neighbour, especially if you’re as much of a Beatles fan as me. Whenever he’d walk through the back door saying: ‘Only me! Just popped in for a cuppa!’, I’d be singing ‘Hey Jude’ in my head the whole way through! He’s a lovely man and like the dad I always wanted.”

Back in August, Cook recalled the “terrifying” moment a van drove into the audience during his set at Woodstock 1999. The DJ and producer looked back during an interview for the three-part docuseries Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, explaining: “I’d been closeted in my dressing room all afternoon with people just going, ‘Oh it’s a bit chaotic out there.’ But no one had told me there’d been any damage – that there’d been any violence.”

Cook will return to the stage for a UK tour in March next year, performing 11 shows – including two each in Birmingham, Manchester and London – in support of his new live album ‘Right Here, Right Then’ (which arrived last month and immortalises the aforementioned Brighton Beach show). See all the dates here, and find tickets here.

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