New York City—Most days, being Fatboy Slim is a good thing. He’s the Cheshire Cat-grinning poster boy for a good time. He’s married to one of England’s most celebrated TV personalities, and a Fatboy or Fatgirl Slim Jr. is expected for Christmas. And he still hasn’t met a pop chart he can’t scale.

But not today. Today, Norman Cook is being shuttled around like cargo—disheveled, jet-lagged cargo in dire need of a shave. Interview. Interview. Photo shoot. Interview. Limousine waiting outside. MTV commitment. Cell phones ringing. Sound check for a gig. Interview.

Of course, it could be worse. Fatboy could be loitering on the set of a video shoot.

“That’s the only thing I hate more than this,” he says, nodding to a small cluster of waiting journalists and photographers as he hurriedly flicks ash from his cigarette. “On a video shoot, I’m just standing around there all day. I can’t do anything. I can’t play guitar. I don’t dance. I’m standing there like, ughh.”

They say you should do what you do best. And the best thing Norman Cook can do is to be Fatboy Slim, a brand name DJ in a pop-culture world gone bonkers with cross marketing and “horizontal leveraging.” Indeed, the revolution has been commercialized.

Just how marketable is Fatboy Slim? From his previous record, for example, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby, Nike, Mercedes-Benz, Kodak and Oldsmobile all signed on to the Fatboy express for their ad campaigns. Furthermore, Radio 1’s Pete Tong, on his first Stateside Essential Selection series, tapped who other than the Fatboy (along with Paul Oakenfold) to push it in the States. And thanks to Fatboy’s remix of “I See You,” Groove Armada now has a career.

And now, On Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, Fatboy has managed to keep the big-beat party rolling, but he hasn’t neglected the “Praise You” constituency whose preference is for soul music in the armchair. They’d be pleased with “Demons,” with its melancholy piano and wistful guitar lick, while Macy Gray scratches out, “All of my demons have whithered away/ecstasy comes and then can not stay.”

A sign of maturity perhaps, or impending fatherhood, but more likely it’s just proof that Fatboy doesn’t write lyrics. For a more accurate gauge on where Fatboy’s head is, look to “Sunset (Bird of Prey).” When Fatboy loops Jim Morrison’s “Flying High” spoken-word vocal from An American Prayer, it’s a resurrection of sorts, a cross-generation gesture from one symbol of excess to another.

And Fatboy’s heart has always been in the right place, too. The early Sunday morning gospel sermon of “Drop the Hate” kicks into a signature Fatboy 303 build and circuitous chemical-like filter effects, a gritty sound furthered on “Star 69.”

But enough about his music. We wanted to talk to Fatboy Slim about his money. He’s got lots of it, and he’s going to get lots more. Fair enough. So here it is.

DJ Times: Congratulations on the Video Music Awards. It must be strange being a white hip-hop guy in the States, selling six million records out of the box…

Fatboy: I think you’ve got the wrong person. You’re probably thinking of Eminem, he’s Slim Shady.

DJ Times: You’re not Slim Shady?

Fatboy: No, I’m Fatboy Slim.

DJ Times: So, you didn’t sell six million records practically out of the box?

Fatboy: Nope.

DJ Times: Oh…I see…

Fatboy: Sorry to disappoint you…

DJ Times: Oh, no, not at all, it’s just that this is our first-ever MONEY issue, and I know Eminem’s Slim Shady has lots of money and we were going to talk about that, and…

Fatboy: You can call me Fatboy Slim Shady. There’s actually a record called Fatboy Slim Shady, which is the drum-n-bass version of “Rockefeller Skank” with the a cappella of “My name is…” and it goes “My name is Funk Soul Brother.” It was a bootleg, and at the Video Music Awards last year, we were both doing press on opposite sides of the room and somebody got us together to talk about it. Unfortunately he hadn’t heard it at the time, so he was a bit bemused. So I said to him, “Since we’ve done a record together I think we should do an interview together about it. He just said “What?” I don’t think he was in the best of moods that night.

DJ Times: Do you get people calling you and asking you if they can sample you?

Fatboy Slim: I actually got a call from U2 last week. I did a sample CD, Skip to My Loops, about eight years ago, it’s just a bunch of drum loops, and the idea is you don’t have to pay for them, they’re just kind of drums, so there’s no real copyright. But every now and then someone, like U2, to cover their asses, will say to us, “Look, we sampled this, are you sure we’re allowed to use it? Do you want any money or clearance?” And I’m like “No, that’s fine, it’s there for you.”

DJ Times: And your music shows up on white labels all the time.

Fatboy: There was a rash of bootlegs in England last summer—obviously, one of them was my own of the “Rockafeller Skank” remix I did with “Satisfaction.” And there was one that took “Right Here Right Now,” and put it to Adeva’s “In and Out Of My Life,” the a cappella, which they then licensed off of us and it got released and went to No. 10 in England, by OnePhatDeeva. I like it when I hear my music on bootlegs. The first thing I want to do when I hear it is get a copy so I can play it in my set, for starters.

DJ Times: It’s like you’re playing your stuff, but once removed.

Fatboy: The funny thing is, with OnePhatDeeva, they told me, “Look, we’ve made a track out of your track, is that alright?” And we said, “It kind of is, except that my track was based on a sample, so you’ll really have to clear it with them, because it’s not really ours to clear to you.” These things kind of go round the world. But, also, it would be hypocritical of me to ever kind of slag someone for sampling me, because I do it all the time.

DJ Times: Are you still using the Akai S950?

Fatboy: And a Roland 303 run by an Atari ST and a very naked monitor. The trouble is it’s harder to get stuff like that that still works. I had one Atari for like 12 years, and it finally blew up after the album. So I went and bought another three, and two of them blew up, or actually, they froze on me. I think they are getting to a point where I might have to learn how to operate a proper computer because it’s getting harder and harder to actually find an Atari computer that still works. But I did buy three of them used—they haven’t made them for about 10 years—and I’m trying to find a monitor at the moment. I’ll walk into a computer shop and I’ll say, “I know you don’t have an Atari monitor, but maybe you’ve got a monitor that’s compatible with it?” And they just laugh and say, “You’re still using an Atari?” and I say, “Oh yeah, I like it. I know how it works.”

DJ Times: Eventually, how will you upgrade, equipment-wise?

Fatboy: If I can get a computer that can run Creator. I don’t know, maybe they’ve already invented a computer that can run old files of Atari. I don’t know, I suppose at some point I’ll have to get e-mail and things like that, there are tons of people who try and e-mail me, and they’re like, “What’s you e-mail address?” and I tell them, “I don’t have one. I don’t have a proper computer. Ring me. Fax me.” We don’t do e-mails as much as we text each other. It’s fun. There are some rude text messages we send each other, a lot of filthy ones.

DJ Times: “Praise You” was the record that really broke you big here. Now you are an international star.

Fatboy: I think it’s kind of changed in England anyway, just because of who I married. Zoe [Ball]—she’s kind of a Jennifer Aniston of England. She’s not an actress, but she’s kind of a celebrity. She used to do—she’s just given it up—the Breakfast National Radio Show, called the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show, and she did this Saturday morning kids program, kind of like a Pee Wee Herman thing. And, yeah, she’s kind of one of the most famous TV personalities in England.

DJ Times: What are some things you can do to get the most popular TV personality in England to marry you?

Fatboy: I don’t know, but she’s taken now, so you can’t have her.

DJ Times: Oh no, I wouldn’t do that. I’m just asking because I’ve had my eye on Katie Couric, and I just figured…

Fatboy: Right, right, good luck. I think if you talk to [Zoe], she’d say I did everything I could not to [marry her], because she was the most popular TV star in England. I thought she was just a fan of the music. And so for about four months she turned up to every single gig, and she was always there. And I just thought she was a fan, and everybody else was like, “You know, I think she’s kind of after you.” And I was like, “Oh I don’t believe it, what would she want with me?”

DJ Times: How did you finally meet her?

Fatboy: I was on her show in Ibiza. She was a fan and kept trying to get me on the show, but because it’s a breakfast show there’s no way that I was ever going to make it. But she was doing the show from Ibiza two years ago. And they said to me, “Well it’s Ibiza, so just go straight from work—you finish work at 7 and her show starts at 7.”

DJ Times: So you went straight from your DJ set to the show.

Fatboy: Well, I actually took her out the night before and neither of us went to bed and we went straight to the show. It’s funny, when we got married, the radio station gave us a CD of the interview and you can hear us flirting with each other live on the radio. Because of that, and at the same time “Praise You” was No. 1—it knocked off Robbie Williams with a No. 1 album—and then we got married, and it was the celebrity wedding of the year. So my celebrity status was just out of sight. And it’s half to do with my success and half to do with hers, so you put the two together. There was an article just the other day, before I left [England], saying something about Noel Gallagher and Meg splitting up, and they said, “Oh it was one of those marriages we all approved of, like Jennifer and Brad and Norman and Zoe.” So we’re kind of in that league, and it’s really kind of bizarre.

DJ Times: What’s the key to a successful celebrity marriage?

Fatboy: Since we’re both in the business, we both know the pressures. Both of us had a serious succession of partners who couldn’t cope with the fact that we were famous. It was like, “How come everybody wants to talk to you? How come you’re away all the time?” It was like, “This is what I do, and you’re really important to me, but unfortunately not to anybody else in my business. But I am and I can’t change that.” I think Zoe and I realized that we’re pretty much the same people. We constantly check each other, and when either of us gets a bit too much showbiz, it’s like “Hey, come on, you!”

DJ Times: Let’s talk about the album a bit. Describe how you put together “Demons,” the track with the Macy Gray vocal.

Fatboy: I presented half the track to her, my half, and then she wrote her half and then we hooked up in L.A. and in about three days we recorded the vocals. Then I treated the vocals as I would treat a sample if I had gotten it off a record. First thing you do is put it in a sampler, and kind of forget that it’s a singer who sings it in a certain order. And you’ve got each line, and sometimes each word, on a different key in your computer, and you can just kind of re-sing the song but using their voice. And there is a line in there, in that song, that I had to censor, the one that goes backwards. And I can’t tell you why, but to give you a clue, if you play it backwards you can probably find out what it said.

DJ Times: Is it cheaper to hire Macy than it is to sample some record?

Fatboy: I don’t know, I never get involved with the deals. I would have thought that it’s more expensive to hire Macy Gray than it is to use cheap samples, but I don’t know. Everyone’s different, you know, sometimes you sample something and they say, “Yeah, yeah, $2,000, that’s fine, you can have it.” And other people want 80-percent of the publishing. But because of that, I say to my manager, “Don’t tell me what the deal was.” If it’s somebody who really sticks us out, then every time I hear the song, I think, “You bastard, you greedy sod.” So I don’t know which ones are cheap and which ones are expensive.

DJ Times: Do you talk to your accountant?

Fatboy: I try to talk to him, but I can’t understand a word he says, and he can’t understand a word I say. He’ll say “Bububa runbummbub,” and I’ll say, “What do you want me to do?” And he’ll say, “Sign this,” and I say fine. I don’t want to get bogged down with business, so I try to get other people to do the meat of it, and also, I’m a terrible businessman. I’m not hard enough to be a businessman.

DJ Times: Describe a typical sample-clearing experience.

Fatboy: When I was halfway through the album, and I knew roughly how it was going to sound, my manager came down and we sat there [listening] and went track by track. “What’s that [sample], what’s that [sample].” And I’ve got all the records out and we’ll write down the label copy and the lawyers have three months or so to clear all the samples. And like I said, he never tells me which ones are expensive and which ones are cheap. I end up hating a track if I learn we got totally stiffed on one. And every time I listen to that track, I’ll think, “You greedy bastard, why wouldn’t you take 50-percent of the track, why’d you have to take 99-percent of it!”

DJ Times: Were there any sample-clearance nightmares?

Fatboy: There was one sample on the album that we couldn’t clear—Steppenwolf. It was a funky little guitar riff, and they just weren’t having it. I think the band had the track in a film or an advert and they just weren’t into it. We’re like, why can’t we phone up the artists and say, “Which part of $100,000 don’t you like?” And they were like, it’s not about money, we just don’t want to do it. And we kept trying, offering them more money, and in the end, they said, “We will not reply to any more of your faxes. As far as we’re concerned, this conversation is over.”

DJ Times: And was the Jim Morrison sample easy to clear?

Fatboy: They were fine. It was Jim Morrison on his own, from an American Prayer, one of his poetry things. I found it on a bootleg and didn’t realize that it had actually come out. And I just set it to music, a basically dreamy and wistful thing…

DJ Times: And no problem clearing it?

Fatboy: No. On the English side, they knew exactly who I was and what I did and how much money it could generate, and I suspect they went through Jim Morrison’s estate and said, “This can make you a quarter million dollars.” That’s one thing about success, it does kind of grease the wheels, when you are trying to clear samples, people can see how much money can be generated for them. People get paid well for samples, especially in my end of the market. It’s a lot easier than it was four years ago.

DJ Times: You’ve still got residencies at the Big Beat Boutique and Fabric. Are those money-making gigs for you?

Fatboy: No, not at all. I’m trying out new tracks a lot, just getting out and about seeing what everybody else is playing. Especially the last six months, I’ve been working on the album and haven’t gotten out that much. So I have to keep up. Plus, I’ve always been a DJ. If I don’t play for a few weeks I start getting an itch. And all these records I get sent I want to play them for people.

DJ Times: If you’re in the process of recording an album, and you get an offer to play a gig in, say, Asia, what do you do?

Fatboy: I say no.

DJ Times: Do you have a price that you would go out for in that case? Fatboy: I’ve turned down a gig for £100,000 within the last few months. I needed to get the album finished. I actually did one for that amount of money in Norway.

DJ Times: Is that the most you’ve ever gotten paid for a gig? Fatboy: Yeah, by a long shot.

DJ Times: Your solution for a skipping turntable?

Fatboy: Oh God, crowd-control barriers. It’s always the really big gig where something like that happens.

DJ Times: “Talkin’ About My Baby” has a real gritty live vocal sample.

Fatboy: The vocal I can tell you about. It’s a band or person called Wet Willie, who apparently was this sort of roadhouse blues person in the ’70s. It’s one of the many albums that I bought in a thrift store in LA, just to go through and sample. And someone said they’d heard of Wet Willie and that he had one hit in the ’70s, sorta like boogie woogie blues and in the middle he broke it down, “Talkin’ bout my baby.” So I just sort of adapted it. It’s about my wife, and her breasts.

DJ Times: She’s OK with that?

Fatboy: Well, one day, we were chatting about things, and she said to me, “Honey, how come you never write a song about me? You could change the name in it, but could you?” I said, “Darling, I don’t write songs, do I?” She said, “Oh yeah, that would be it.” In the absence of me writing songs, I don’t really write lyrics, all I can really do is re-arrange other people’s. So, what I did with that song, I said to her when I finished the album, I told her track one is her song. I said, “I dedicate it to you but obviously I didn’t write it.” That kept me out of trouble.

DJ Times: On “Star 69,” you keep saying they don’t know what is up. Who are they?

Fatboy: I don’t know. I wrote that the evening after going to my nan’s funeral. And I got back from the funeral and didn’t know what to do, so I went into the studio, and that came out. It’s kind of that anger, when you lose someone, but I have no idea who I am angry with. There wasn’t any they who took her away from me. So no, there wasn’t a specific they.

DJ Times: Is there a difference between a dancefloor and a church?

Fatboy: I think they’re one in the same thing, but we just worship different gods. I mean the whole point of the “Song for Shelter” is saying it is like a church. But we worship dancing, drugs and laughter rather than Jesus. But it’s the same feeling you get in church, when you got that many people all together, clapping their hands and celebrating. But we just celebrate different things.

DJ Times: For both church and club, I suppose, weekly attendance is helpful.

Fatboy: Yeah, I think you’ll find on the whole that weekly attendance is going up in nightclubs and going down in churches. My footnote to that song is why should God have all the best choons?

DJ Times: On “Drop the Hate,” you’ve got a spirited Gospel preacher sampled. Who is that?

Fatboy: I don’t know, we only just found out. It was a cassette of an old sermon that someone had given me years ago, it was probably like Reverend Leo G. Williams III or something like that, just some preacher. He’s dead now.

DJ Times: What happens two years after a critical backlash? Can you relapse into a critical backlash—a backlash relapse?

Fatboy: No. My way of getting around that was operating under the false names, so no one knew it was me. By the time they found out it was me, they already thought [the music] was good. I had to trick them into liking me again. It’s a good way to work if you can get away with it. What you mustn’t do is the people who kind of reduce their promo to DJs and it says EJ, and it’s a Junior Vasquez dance mix, and then when everyone found out it was Elton John, they were like, “Fuck off.” You have to maintain your pseudonym until everyone really likes the music, and then you can go “Ha, see I’m not that bad after all, am I?”

DJ Times: Since You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, you’re no longer making music for the dancefloor, but the armchair as well. How does one go about making music for the armchair?

Fatboy: Am I allowed to contest that statement?

DJ Times: No. Fatboy: Well, then, I’d say I’m kind of halfway across the room to the armchair from the dancefloor, but not settled into it yet. I think if you marry a beautiful woman, become a father and spend a lot more of time watching sunsets rather than taking drugs in clubs, that kind of helps.

DJ Times: Have your old friends Freakpower, Pizzaman or Might Dub Katz helped out at all on this album?

Fatboy: The lead singer of Freakpower makes a guest appearance. I think Pizzaman would have got thrown out on his ear if he’d shown up—he’s too jolly and too cheesy and he would have been sent packing. I think a couple of the Mighty Dub Katz might have been hanging around for a couple of tracks, like “Star 69” and “Retox.”