Music
Fatboy Slim introduces the Smile High Club
DJ Norman Cook talks his acid house extravaganza, which touches down in London on January 2 2016.
Fatboy Slim's Smile High Club live
© [unknown]
The idea behind Smile High Club came out of being invited to play Creamfields for two years running, and thinking I don’t really want to come back and play the same set on the same stage, so let’s try something different. So the organisers said, why don’t you curate a stage? Usually, that means, you know, you put a couple of banners up. But I started talking to my management people – like, how can we make it different? I wanted it so if you come into our tent it feels different to the rest of the festival – a club within a festival.
The acid house smiley has kind of become my logo. I got a tattoo of it, and then it’s hard to shake off. I actually collect them – they used to be all over the house, but the wife wasn’t that into it. She said it was like living in some smiley theme park, so it’s all condensed into one wall display. I was thinking about that. And then the name just popped into my head: the Smile High Club. We tried it at Creamfields and SW4, and realised it totally works.
The idea is to create a club where the emphasis is on being slightly stupid without resorting to slapstick
Fatboy Slim, at home with his smileys
© [unknown]
The idea is to create a club where the emphasis is on being slightly stupid without resorting to slapstick. The most impressive prank is the acid convertor, where basically an enormous great Portacabin with four windows. You go in one end looking normal, and you come out the other end painted yellow with a smiley on your face. It involved various processes - there’s a spray painter, a leaf blower. And you’re kind of on show to the audience as we do it – it’s quite interactive, really. You do it all day, and by the end of the day 200 people in the crowd have smiley faces. If you met them all at night on Halloween you’d be quite scared. But put them in the middle of the crowd and it’s quite funny. That’s our greatest hit - that and the human smiley at Creamfields - a thousand-strong smiley that could be seen from space.
Music –wise, I’ve not really tailor-made my set to make it slightly more smiley than usual. But you know I’m a party DJ, not a moody DJ I’m always trying to put a smile on people’s faces anyway. I describe my music as acid house party anyway, and that fits right in – it’s tailor made for it, really.
January 2 is the new New Year's Eve, apparently
The show at Tobacco Dock is a daytime rave, which I haven’t done a lot of before. But I personally think to be last on at 10 o'clock at night is a lot better than being last on a six in the morning, because people can be flagging. I’m quite amused about the date – January 2. You’d think it might be the worst day of the year to put on a show, but it was my management’s target date. It’s the new New Year’s Eve, apparently. I think it’s people who went out on New Year’s Eve and had a great one, weren’t capable of much on New Year’s Day, but have to get back to work at some point so they can’t have a late one. There must be an algorithm you can plug into social media, to find out exactly the optimum time to have a party.
A lot of people still remember me for the shows on Brighton beach, which were on a different scale. We learned a lot about putting on gigs from them. If you put on a free event you’d better make sure you aren’t going to have everybody coming, because without a fence or security, you’ve can’t control the numbers. The second one on Brighton beach was almost verging on disaster, and we were lucky that we retained some kind of control over it. But in retrospect it launched a career for me – Brazil rung up and said can you do it on the beach in Rio, the Australians rang up and asked if I could come on do it on Bondi beach. And it got me a rep in Brighton, too. Every taxi driver and off license owner in Brighton still thanks me on an almost daily basis – they did the best out of it, I think!
Smile High Club comes to London’s Tobacco Dock on January 2 2016, with Fatboy Slim, 2ManyDJs, Secondcity, Breach, Erol Alkan, Cyril Hahn and more.
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