Fatboy Slim announces Big Beach Boutique 20th anniversary documentary
Fatboy Slim is currently working on a new documentary to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his momentous Big Beach Boutique party.
Announcing the documentary on Rebecca Judd’s Apple Music 1 show last week, the Brighton DJ – real name Norman Cook – explained how he ‘has revisited the party in his brain quite a few times’. “And just the idea of what’s happened to me and my life over the last 20 years, how the scene and music business has changed in the last 20 years,” he said. “And yeah, it’s quite nice to take stock. So rather than counting down the days until doing this, I’ve been taking stock of what it means to come back and do it 20 years later.”
During the interview, he discusses the “good-natured chaos” of the party, which saw more than 250,000 ravers – twice the size of Brighton’s population – gather on the beachfront for the free event on 13th July 2002 to watch Fatboy Slim. The rave was described as the “biggest event the UK has ever seen”.
“It cemented my relationship with the city,” he said of the landmark rave, describing himself as a “sort of local boy made good”, and referring to himself and ex-wife Zoe Ball as “the Posh and Becks of the acid house generation”. “20 years ago I was probably at the height of my powers; and it’s like being on a big wave, it’s fun when you’re on the top of it but you’ll be looking down thinking ‘whoah, what if I fall off!'”, he said.
“Looking back on it and reassessing it 20 years later for the documentary, I’m like ‘it kind of was like a Woodstock moment’. It was like a moment when this idea of our culture or what we were doing suddenly became bigger than unmanageable’… I’m happy with people describing it as “historic”, I think we made history”.
No further details about the documentary are known as yet but the announcement follows the previously announced Big Beach Boutique deluxe box set, ‘Right Here, Right Then’, which comprises a brand Fatboy Slim new DJ mix, a DVD of the original concert, a 48-page,12” book with exclusive photos and a foreword penned by Cook, and much more.
