Fatboy Slim says he’s lost the passion for making music

It’s been nearly 15 years since Fatboy Slim released anything resembling a full-length album. That was Here Lies Love, a concept album collaboration between the electronic musician and erstwhile Talking Head David Byrne that eventually became a Broadway show in 2023. His last solo album was more than 20 years ago; Palookaville came out in October of 2004. While there have been a couple of loose tracks here and there, the deejay (born Norman Cook) has hardly maintained the output he had at the turn of the millennium. Apparently, he just really hasn’t been feeling it. 

“The thing is, you can’t make music unless you’re absolutely passionate about it and it drives you from the moment you wake up in the morning,” Fatboy Slim tells The Sun in a recent article. “I just don’t seem to feel like that anymore. I feel like that about DJing and about putting on things like this, but I’ve kind of lost my passion for making music. For five years, I tried to beat myself up about it and go, ‘You should be doing this’. But then I thought, ‘Well, everybody likes my DJing and I enjoy that more, so I’ll do that’. I’m hoping that one day the passion will come back.”

It’s unclear when exactly Cook gave the quote to The Sun, but he did just experience another personal tragedy—the death of his mother—on Christmas, which could impact his feelings on making music as well. That said, it doesn’t sound like he has any intent to stop performing, and is open to music arriving that way. “My last two singles just came out of a live show,” the deejay explains. “They were both things that I made just to play on the side. I had tunes that nobody else had in my set. And that kind of caught on with people when we worked out that we could clear the samples and release them.” As of now, the artist still has shows scheduled quite literally all over the world—his next dates are in Indonesia, Texas, Mexico, and Italy—so there’s still plenty of opportunities for something new to sprout.