Fatboy Slim says he felt paralyzed at the prospect of DJ getting sober after rehab | Fatboy Slim

Fatboy Slim said he felt paralyzed and “so afraid” at the prospect of the DJ getting sober after spending time in rehab to deal with his alcohol addiction.

The artist, whose real name is Norman Cook, referred to his alcoholism as a parasite and said getting sober was “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done” during an appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs with Lauren Laverne.

He said he was asked to address his problem after his wife at the time, radio presenter Zoe Ball, said she would leave him if he did not stop drinking. “That was my awakening moment. There were a lot of people yelling at me before, but they were whispered very quietly in the end.

“Addiction is a strange disease and it’s like a parasite, it protects itself. It knows that if you quit, it won’t have anywhere to live anymore, so it will do things to you to keep you.”

“Maybe in the last year of drinking, I wasn’t really enjoying it, and things started to go downhill in my life.”

He checked into a rehab facility in 2009 and has since been sober for nearly 15 years. He said that while he was in rehab, it occurred to him that he had sought help “at the right time.”

When asked if he had found it easy to quit smoking, he said: “No, definitely not. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done… I couldn’t have done it without going to rehab. I needed someone to hit my head for a month. You know, ‘You’re going to die, and you’re going to be miserable if you don’t stop doing this.'”

He said the anxiety he felt returning to the stage for a sober performance took some time to subside. “For the first five shows, I was paralyzed and stiff with fear, I couldn’t dance, I couldn’t enjoy it. I was thinking: ‘What are you actually doing?’ Why would you play this record next? Why will they react to it?

He said that “A Beautiful Night in Japan” helped him overcome his fears because the audience was “really enthusiastic”, and he realized that his job was to make the audience happy. “Everything fell into place,” he said.

After performing with the Housemartins alongside Paul Heaton, who would go on to form the Beautiful South, Cook rose to prominence as Fatboy Slim in the 1990s. He released a string of hits that included Praise You, The Rockafeller Skank and Right Here, Right Now.

He has received six Grammy Award nominations and won the 2002 Best Music Video award for “Weapon of Choice,” which stars Hollywood actor Christopher Walken dancing in a deserted hotel lobby.

The full Desert Island Discs episode can be heard on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.