Fatboy Slim closes Radio 1's Big Weekend with nostalgia-fuelled dance set

Fatboy Slim took the stage as the sun dipped lower over Herrington Country Park in Sunderland on Friday evening, closing out the opening day of BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend with a set that felt less like a performance and more like a victory lap through three decades of dance music. The 62-year-old DJ—born Norman Cook, a name most of the thousands gathered there probably didn't know—moved through his catalog with the ease of someone who has played these songs so many times they've become part of the landscape of British nightlife. He opened with a tease of Praise You, one of his defining tracks, then immediately pivoted to Queen's Don't Stop Me Now, a move that announced his strategy for the night: take the songs people knew and loved, then remix them into something new.

The crowd responded by doing what crowds at dance festivals do: they chanted, they bounced, they moved as one organism. When he delivered the full version of Praise You, it came wrapped in samples and layered with other voices and sounds, transformed but recognizable. The Rockafeller Skank got a dose of Eminem's Slim Shady mixed into it. The Killers' Mr Brightside appeared on the main stage and the entire field sang it back to him, word for word. He shifted gears into acid house, and the phrase "eat, sleep, rave, repeat" echoed across the field. Before the set, Cook had told BBC Newsbeat he'd spent the week editing his material for broadcast, removing swear words and adjusting the mix for a live BBC audience. He'd joked about taking his set apart piece by piece, which is exactly what he seemed to do on stage—breaking down his own songs and rebuilding them in real time.

Cook's rise had been unlikely. In the 1980s, he'd played in The Housemartins, a band that had nothing to do with dance music. Then came Beats International, a project that pointed toward what he would become. But it was the 1990s that made him essential. He and artists like the Chemical Brothers and Death in Vegas had helped invent big beat, a genre that lived somewhere between hip hop and acid house, and they'd made it impossible to ignore. By the time he took the stage Friday night, he was a veteran of a scene that had fundamentally changed how people heard electronic music.

Before Fatboy Slim arrived, the day had built steadily. Sonny Fodera had opened the main stage in the afternoon heat, playing tracks like Think About Us and All This Time, with Clementine Douglas joining him for their collaboration Tell Me. Fisher, an Australian house and techno producer, had brought actual fire to the stage—pyrotechnics that lit up the afternoon sky. His set included a remix of Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know and his own track Losing It, which had earned him a Grammy nomination in 2019. MK, a Detroit-born producer who had spent three decades shaping electronic dance music, had turned the sky purple with confetti cannons while bringing out singer Poppy Baskcomb for their new track Zone. His viral hit Dior, released the year before, had become an instant club staple, and he'd played it to a crowd that knew every beat.

The day had spanned multiple styles and generations. Notion, a bassline DJ, and Marlon Hoffstadt, who worked in trance, had both played. HorsegiirL, a German DJ and singer who performs in a chestnut-colored horse head mask and describes herself as a human horse, had been scheduled for the New Music stage but pulled out at the last minute due to illness. Tens of thousands of people had come to Herrington Country Park for this opening day, and tens of thousands more would arrive over the weekend. Zara Larsson and Olivia Dean were set to headline Saturday and Sunday, bringing pop to a festival that had opened with pure, uncut dance.