DJ Fatboy Slim joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about his nationwide tour ‘We’ve Come A Long Long Way Together’ in November and getting behind the decks (or counter) and serving ice-cream to help his mental health.
On his current day job at a family community cafe:
“It’s at the end of my road and I took it over about seven years ago. It’s called The Big Beach Cafe and it’s in Hove Lagoon which is literally the end of my road and it’s a family community cafe. Both my kids have worked there over the years but then after 10 months of sitting around doing absolutely nothing because I can’t do my regular job I got drafted in to help out because we lost two-thirds of our staff as they had to quarantine. So I stepped in and it was really good for my mental health to get out of the house and talk to people. It’s very popular with walkers, so all the way through this current lockdown it’s a destination for people out on their exercise walks.”
“My mental health is a lot better if I get to talk to people all day rather than sit around not doing anything. It’s a lovely little community. There is a lot of dog action, there’s a lot of kid action and it’s just a really friendly place to be rather than sitting around watching daytime TV. It was built in 1910 so it’s very much an old school cafe. We do lots of veganism and organic produce, but we have basically a very traditional cafe and have lots of chips and burgers and coffees and ice cream.”
On DJing through the pandemic:
“For most DJs our only avenue of expressing ourselves is to do live streams but for me the whole experience of DJing, the whole magic of it, is that communication with the crowd and the conversation you have. It’s a two-way street and if you remove the crowd it’s just a bloke playing records on the table.”
“The streams that we have done, I’ve tried to put a little twist on it. The one I did with Idris [Elba] and we were Zooming into people’s lounges so we could see them on a big screen. We could wave at them, send messages, dance with him and fist bump them through the screen which was quite a laugh.”
On his big arena tour in November:
“We did it a couple of years ago and it’s an experiment of putting something that normally shouldn’t work in arenas – DJing for me is kind of a conversation – but we’ve worked out if we do it in the round, it stops being an arena and it feels like a really enormous party or a nightclub. So I play on a revolving stage and it just makes it more intimate if you could ever be intimate in an arena. Like every other person in my business, I’m just gagging to get back out there. We’ve all been just chomping at the bit. I think it’s quite important how we connect because so many of us have been disconnected from each other for so long.”
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