Big Beach Boutique: the Norman invasion (27 sep 2008)

27 September 2008 Francis news 0

It’s Fatboy Slim aka Norman Cook’s fourth beach party on Saturday September 27. He hopes it won’t be a repeat of 2002’s, he tells Thomas H Green

Norman Cook, otherwise known as the DJ Fatboy Slim, made his name organising and performing at a series of three enormous beach parties in his home town of Brighton.

Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim, host of the Big Beach Boutique parties Part of Brighton folklore: Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim, host of the Big Beach Boutique parties

Called Big Beach Boutique, the events have attracted hundreds of thousands of revellers, caused traffic chaos and provoked tabloid censure. As he prepares for today’s fourth in the series, Cook recalls how he found himself hosting the biggest beach parties this country has seen.

Big Beach Boutique I July 6 2001

Channel 4 had just got the franchise for the cricket and decided to show the matches on outdoor screens around the country, including one on Brighton beach. Someone said to me, "On Friday, when nothing’s going on with the cricket, why don’t you use the enormous screens and big sound system for a gig?", and Channel 4 agreed to sponsor it.

We didn’t know how many people would turn up. The official number was 35,000 – in fact it was more like 65,000. It was such a thrill. Everyone brought their families down to have a barbecue and listen to the music. I came off stage and said to my manager, "That’s it, we’ll never top this."

Big Beach Boutique II July 13 2002

It was really exciting in the afternoon as more and more people arrived. Then still the crowds kept coming and the police said, "We’re going to have to stop this because the whole town is gridlocked and the A23’s at a standstill." But we worked out that it would be more dangerous not to go ahead with it. By the end there were 250,000 people – double the population of Brighton. It was epic: yachts all along the shoreline, a sea of waving hands as far as you could see. We’d gone to a lot of trouble to make sure it was safe but there were over twice as many people as we’d expected. If there’d been a panic it could have gone really badly wrong, like at Hillsborough.

By the end I was just relieved to get away with it. Everyone in Brighton, even the local paper, woke up the next day and said, "It’s a bit messy but what a great party." The tabloids, however, were saying, "Disaster! Anarchy!" and reported two deaths. The phone didn’t stop ringing and while we were working out what had happened, I felt responsible for those deaths. I talked to Paul McCartney who was my neighbour at the time. He said, "Get in a car and leave the country, come back when it calms down. Don’t read the papers." So ZoÃ« (Ball, his wife) and I went to France.

It turned out that a supposed heart-attack fatality didn’t even exist, and that the girl who did die, an Australian nurse, fell 20 feet off the promenade hours after the event (later dying of head injuries). She’d spoken to her parents that evening and said, "I’m having the best night of my life." ZoÃ« and I sent flowers to her funeral and her parents phoned and said, "Thank you so much, please don’t feel responsible."

Big Beach Boutique III January 1 2007

After that, we were forbidden to play Brighton again in the summer, so we played Bondi Beach one New Year’s Eve, the Black Sea in Romania, Flamengo Beach in Rio, about 30 beaches around the world – but every time I went into Brighton, people would say, "When are you going to do another one here?" I wanted to prove we could do it again, but to guarantee that masses of people didn’t turn up we were only allowed to do it on New Year’s Day, with the numbers limited to 25,000.

Everything went smoothly apart from the weather which was very bad, freezing sleet coming in horizontally, although there were still lads down the front with their tops off in some rave version of the Dunkirk spirit. Even the covered stage was being soaked and I kept getting electric shocks from the equipment. To be honest, though, it was keeping my hands warm. There had been a three-year gap trying to work out a safe way forward and it was just ironic that, in the end, everybody was safe apart from me.

Now, for Big Beach Boutique IV. The police said we didn’t have to do it in mid-winter again, and I’m really pleased. After all, Big Beach Boutique is now part of Brighton folklore.