It was hardly the setting for one of the world’s most popular DJs.
Fatboy Slim played to an Australian soccer-loving crowd of barely 1,000 people under a marquee on a cold night in South Africa on Wednesday night.
But for those lucky enough to be there as part of the Fanatics World Cup tour group, it was a performance worthy of being the final act in the Big Day Out’s Boiler Room.
Fatboy Slim, whose real name is Norman Cook, was in the right spirit from the moment he stepped on stage wearing a gold ‘Fanatics’ hoodie, the same hoodie most of the crowd was wearing.
Given he’s a proud Englishman and a lover of football, it was a big crowd lifter to see Fatboy Slim in the Aussie soccer gear. He regularly waved a scarf in the air and at one point changed into a 1974 Socceroos shirt, then kissed the badge.
He played a two-hour DJ set without a stop, regularly bouncing up and down and blasting the crowd with sirens to huge cheers. Staff threw custom-made green-and-gold Fatboy Slim scarves into the crowd.
The music was typically charged with all the Fatboy Slim favourites including “Praise You”, “Rockerfeller Skank”, and “Right Here, Right Now”.
But the biggest reactions from the crowd were for party hits like House Of Pain’s “Jump Around” Survivor’s “Eye Of The Tiger”, and White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, all of which sounded amazing with Fatboy Slim’s thumping bass line.
The most interesting of the Fatboy Slim samples was Art vs Science’s “Parlous Vou Francais”. The Sydney dance act has had a meteoric rise in the past 12 months and would no doubt have been pumped to hear their track worked so neatly into the set of such a dance music legend.
- Daniel Bryant