Premiere: Fatboy Slim Dazzles Hometown Crowd With 'Praise You'

Premiere: Fatboy Slim Dazzles Hometown Crowd With 'Praise You'DJ filmed concert movie 'Live: From the Big Beach Bootique' at new soccer stadium $(document).ready(function() { $('.socialActionsTop .pageActions .email-content').hover( function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.email').show(); }, function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.email').hide(); } ); $('.socialActionsTop .pageActions .print-page').hover( function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.print').show(); }, function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.print').hide(); } ); }); By

Fatboy Slim says his new film Live: From the Big Beach Bootique captures "a momentous moment in my career." 

The film documents DJ Norman Cook's June 2012 two-night stand at the new Amex Stadium in his hometown of Brighton, England. Watch this exclusive five-minute clip from the movie, which plays in theaters around the world for one day only August 31st. The gigs were the first at the stadium, which opened in 2011.

Cook says the DVD of one of his previous Brighton shows, 2006's Big Beach Boutique II: The Movie, helped launch his international career and hopes the latest film will provide a similar "calling card" for his new stadium-sized stage show. "It was the biggest production we've ever done," says Cook. "When you look at Big Beach Boutique II, there's an awful lot of people and not very much show. But technology has allowed us to make things much more visual. A triumphant conquering of your home football stadium has to be worth having down for posterity."

The Amex is the new, permanent ground for Cook's beloved soccer team Brighton & Hove Albion, which had been homeless for 14 years. "I'd been on marches, I'd taken petitions to Downing Street to try and get planning permission," says Cook. "It was an emotional moment just having the stadium, but being able to christen it was every schoolboy's dream."

The video clip captures the show in full swing, with Cook pumping out "Praise You" in a set that included "Put Your Hands Up" and "Fucking in Heaven" for a wildly enthusiastic crowd. But despite headlining recent festivals including Miami's Ultra and New York's Electric Daisy Carnival, Cook says his future plans are focused on "weirder and stranger" rather than "bigger and bigger."

"Tonight, I played to 350 people at a beach bar," he says. "Last night I played to 8,000 at [Ibiza nightclub] Space and four nights ago I did the Olympic Closing Ceremony to one billion people worldwide – and enjoyed them all equally. I've scaled most of the heights a DJ is ever going to scale, so I'm just making a bucket list of things I haven't done."

Despite some criticism of the Olympics closing ceremony in the U.K. media, Cook said appearing was "a total mindfuck and an honor."

"I felt I was representing Team GB for Club Culture," he says. "Although when you embark on a career as a DJ you never really envisage yourself on top of a psychedelic bus, being engulfed by a 40 foot high fluorescent octopus. That wasn't what I was thinking of when I was learning to beat match!"

Cook doesn't rule out a return to his recording artist career, which brought him hits including "Praise You" and "The Rockafeller Skank."

"When I've got something that I really want to say, I'll release [it], but at the moment I'm not inspired in the way I am by the life of a DJ," he says. "When I was younger I could be an artist, remixer, produce other people and DJ. These days, I don't know how I ever found the hours in the day!"

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My Morning Jacket Take Over Hometown Forecastle Festival in Louisville

My Morning Jacket performs at Forecastle Festival in Louisville, Kentucky.

Last week, as they boarded a tiny plane from New York to Louisville, Kentucky, several guys wearing My Morning Jacket t-shirts found one another. Show counts were exchanged; one fan was nearing 50. Five minutes later, the scene repeated itself, only this time with a group sporting Wilco t-shirts. There was little doubt as to where they were headed.

This weekend, Louisville and My Morning Jacket played host to the 10th incarnation of the Forecastle Festival, which was held on Louisville's waterfront flanking the Ohio River and expected to draw roughly 35,000 attendees. MMJ's curation – they hand-selected a portion of the lineup and gave input on festival amenities – was one of this year's several upgrades to the festival, which recently joined forced with Bonnaroo and Moogfest producer AC Entertainment in hopes of expanding from a regional fest to a tourist event. 

For its pivotal year, Forecastle chose wisely in terms of headliners: My Morning Jacket, Wilco and Bassnectar, all of whom have dedicated fans willing to travel for their shows. The dance artist Bassnectar, while not as high-profile in the EDM scene as Skrillex or Deadmau5, got kids in DayGlo clothes and body glitter bugging out of their minds so intensely on Friday night that photographers had little interest in capturing any other set. Not far away, Flying Lotus played under a highway to a small crowd, yet another of the many EDM options for a seemingly rock-centric festival. In fact, nearly 30 percent of the festival's lineup was dedicated to electronic artists, and Forecastle founder J.K. McKnight envisions it reaching half in future years.

The main attraction for most was Louisville's own My Morning Jacket, who played into the wee hours of Sunday morning in one of the largest hometown shows in their career. The nearly three-hour set was not focused on the band's latest album, 2011's Circuital; variety was key throughout the ferocious set, which featured an array of MMJ gems through the years ("The Bear," "Run Thru," "I'm Amazed"), special guests (Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Andrew Bird, who played with his band right before MMJ), and covers of Elton John's "Rocket Man," the Band's "It Makes No Difference" and George Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity." But it was a more unexpected cover – George Michael's "Careless Whisper" – that stole the show, from the opening notes of its sultry sax to James' vamping about Michael. "George Michael's a fucking genius, but he gets a lot of shit," James declared just before imitating the British singer in his Kentucky accent. The party continued offsite shortly after the band closed their set with "One Big Holiday" – James boarded an old steamboat just down the Ohio River, working his mystery with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to a crowd of 1,000, a change of scene from the glowstick-hurling obsessives he had just faced.

The crowd at Wilco's 90-minute set on Sunday night was a bit less intense than MMJ's legion. Looking a little like Neil Young, frontman Jeff Tweedy was in a less chatty mood than usual, keeping stage banter to one marriage joke and a birthday sing-along for Woody Guthrie's 100th. The set was as much focused on Wilco's seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as it was about 2011's The Whole Love, with favorites like "Heavy Metal Drummer" and "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" inspiring guitar spazzery from Nels Cline and hearty sing-alongs from the audience.

Neko Case warmed up the Wilco crowd, playing old favorites and upbeat tracks from a new album that she promised would be released soon. Case is verbose – that much, fans know from her Twitter – but she was in rare form on Sunday, "hallucinating" from the heat and chronicling her butt sweat. Her back-and-forth banter with backing vocalist Kelly Hogan, who played a solo set earlier in the day, is the stuff of comedy routines, or at least an episode of Gilmore Girls.

While Case and other artists commented on the heat, it was a welcome change from the rain that forced Forecastle to push back its opening and condense set times on Saturday. After the weather cleared, indie rockers Real Estate attempted to start a beach party during their afternoon set of sunny pop, asking the crowd to go wild with beach balls (some of which came hurling at band members). Real Estate was one act that also performed at this weekend's Pitchfork Music Festival Chicago; others included the Friday night crowd-pleasers Sleigh Bells. Forecastle's McKnight told Rolling Stone that Pitchfork organizers actually aided in routing bands toward Louisville, just 300 miles down the road. It was an advantageous move for all; from Beach House's stunning sunset show on Friday to Lower Dens' Sunday afternoon drone session in the sizzling sun, the Pitchfork constituency – and all festivalgoers at Forecastle – had  plenty of options.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Shearwater Celebrate New CD With Hometown Gig in Austin

Shearwater perform for the band's CD release party at Antone's in Austin, Texas.

The Austin band Shearwater has transformed itself from an art band that relied on the patience of its audience in a game of tension-and-release into a full-on rock band. As a CD release gig for the new album Animal Joy proved last night at Antone's, the band seems intent on winning over new fans by pummeling them with a three-guitar assault, a double-drums blitzkrieg and a choirboy voice that howls like a child in Lord of the Flies.

Rewind to January 2010. Shearwater had just played their "Island Arc" trilogy at a church in Austin. The back-to-back-to-back performance of 2006's Palo Santo, 2008's Rook and 2010's The Golden Archipelago – critically lauded but commercially lackluster albums – signaled for frontman Jonathan Meiburg the close of a chapter. Core band members went their own ways – drummer Thor Harris hit the road with Swans and bassist Kimberly Burke (Meiburg's ex-wife) dug into life in Boston as a playwright, with a new family.

Meiburg, meanwhile, entered a crummy practice space, turned his electric guitar way up and set about writing something personal, something that would tap into his emotional intelligence, something that would convey times in his life when his blood was pumping in overdrive.

"I wanted the new record to have a body, not just a brain," Meiburg said by phone a couple weeks ago. "I meant it to evoke a moment in which you realize that the course of your life has to change, whether you like it or not, and that your old life has to die so that a new one can begin. There's pain and also exhilaration in breaking free and becoming yourself."

Those ideas are manifested in songs like "Breaking the Yearlings," a big, ominous anthem with a hair-raising undercurrent of keyboard that sounds like a church organ, and the majestic, piano-driven "You As You Were," in which the line "I am leaving the life" is sung over and over (nine times in a row last night), until the words combust and Meiburg is symbolically reborn.

The main difference between old and new Shearwater is that the older version had in Harris a percussionist with a less-is-more approach, whereas the revamped band has in drummer Danny Reisch, who recorded Animal Joy, a player who likes to pop and mash his skins. (Harris was in attendance last night and was saluted by new Shearwater, sparking onstage banter about making a t-shirt for Reisch that reads "Where's Thor?")

"We talked about making the rhythm section much more upfront and precise, rather than distant and gauzy," Meiburg said. "We also forbid ourselves the use of strings or other orchestral instruments, a rule we bent only for a shrieking clarinet that sounds like someone bending a steel beam in half."

That added power made "Dread Sovereign" and "Insolence," two autobiographical songs that might have slow-burned into oblivion with the old band, into creatures who fight to the death. Combine it with an arsenal of rabid guitars and you have a perfect rock song like "Immaculate," a short-circuit take on striving to be perfect.

Trying to decide which band is better, the old or the new, might leave you confounded. Don't worry: it did the same for Matador Records, who balked at Shearwater after the Island Arc trilogy.

"We love Matador, but our contract came to an end," Meiburg said. "And they didn't want the demos for the new record."

This opened the door for Sub Pop to sign Shearwater. Ironically, Matador co-founder Gerard Cosloy wrote in promotional materials for Animal Joy, "Just give ‘em the fucking Grammy already!"

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Shearwater Celebrate New CD With Hometown Gig in Austin

Shearwater perform for the band's CD release party at Antone's in Austin, Texas.

The Austin band Shearwater has transformed itself from an art band that relied on the patience of its audience in a game of tension-and-release into a full-on rock band. As a CD release gig for the new album Animal Joy proved last night at Antone's, the band seems intent on winning over new fans by pummeling them with a three-guitar assault, a double-drums blitzkrieg and a choirboy voice that howls like a child in Lord of the Flies.

Rewind to January 2010. Shearwater had just played their "Island Arc" trilogy at a church in Austin. The back-to-back-to-back performance of 2006's Palo Santo, 2008's Rook and 2010's The Golden Archipelago – critically lauded but commercially lackluster albums – signaled for frontman Jonathan Meiburg the close of a chapter. Core band members went their own ways – drummer Thor Harris hit the road with Swans and bassist Kimberly Burke (Meiburg's ex-wife) dug into life in Boston as a playwright, with a new family.

Meiburg, meanwhile, entered a crummy practice space, turned his electric guitar way up and set about writing something personal, something that would tap into his emotional intelligence, something that would convey times in his life when his blood was pumping in overdrive.

"I wanted the new record to have a body, not just a brain," Meiburg said by phone a couple weeks ago. "I meant it to evoke a moment in which you realize that the course of your life has to change, whether you like it or not, and that your old life has to die so that a new one can begin. There's pain and also exhilaration in breaking free and becoming yourself."

Those ideas are manifested in songs like "Breaking the Yearlings," a big, ominous anthem with a hair-raising undercurrent of keyboard that sounds like a church organ, and the majestic, piano-driven "You As You Were," in which the line "I am leaving the life" is sung over and over (nine times in a row last night), until the words combust and Meiburg is symbolically reborn.

The main difference between old and new Shearwater is that the older version had in Harris a percussionist with a less-is-more approach, whereas the revamped band has in drummer Danny Reisch, who recorded Animal Joy, a player who likes to pop and mash his skins. (Harris was in attendance last night and was saluted by new Shearwater, sparking onstage banter about making a t-shirt for Reisch that reads "Where's Thor?")

"We talked about making the rhythm section much more upfront and precise, rather than distant and gauzy," Meiburg said. "We also forbid ourselves the use of strings or other orchestral instruments, a rule we bent only for a shrieking clarinet that sounds like someone bending a steel beam in half."

That added power made "Dread Sovereign" and "Insolence," two autobiographical songs that might have slow-burned into oblivion with the old band, into creatures who fight to the death. Combine it with an arsenal of rabid guitars and you have a perfect rock song like "Immaculate," a short-circuit take on striving to be perfect.

Trying to decide which band is better, the old or the new, might leave you confounded. Don't worry: it did the same for Matador Records, who balked at Shearwater after the Island Arc trilogy.

"We love Matador, but our contract came to an end," Meiburg said. "And they didn't want the demos for the new record."

This opened the door for Sub Pop to sign Shearwater. Ironically, Matador co-founder Gerard Cosloy wrote in promotional materials for Animal Joy, "Just give ‘em the fucking Grammy already!"

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Read more »

The B-52's Celebrate 35 Years With Hometown Party

The B-52's Celebrate 35 Years With Hometown Party in Athens, Georgia.

They didn't really know what they were doing – didn't even totally know how to play their instruments, if they were being honest. But back in 1977, a couple of the band's friends were holding a Valentine's Day house party at a place on Milledge Ave. in Athens, Ga., just across the street from where the Dunkin' Donuts sits today. The B-52's – a band that would christen itself after the beehive hairdo that bore an aesthetic similarity to a Boeing-designed strategic bomber – were playing for 25 or so people, who were dancing like crazy. The band set up in the foyer, the audience was in the living room. It was cramped, but there was a keg. Someone was taking photographs of hands, feet, dresses, legs. The floor was about to cave in.

"We weren't really a band at the time," Keith Strickland tells Rolling Stone. "But Fred [Schneider, B-52's frontman] said we were, so then we had to be one, and we had to shore up some songs. I think we [ended up] with about six, which were 'Rock Lobster,' 'Planet Claire,' 'Lava,' 'Killer Bees' and 'Strobe Light.'"

Last night, just about a mile and a half from that house, and 35 years nearly to the day of that very first, awkward, performance-art of a performance, the B-52's played the Classic Center in downtown Athens. But it felt less like a couple thousand people housed within a fancy venue and more like a gathering of old friends – ones who came bedecked in pinstriped blazers with leopard-print lapels, colored wigs, and lights draped or attached all over their bodies, but old friends nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly, it was also a tribute night of sorts to Athens itself. From local upstarts Tunabunny, who were recommended as an opener to Schneider by the folks at legendary local record store Wuxtry, to the local Terrapin Beer Company brews flowing in and out of flimsy plastic cups, to the "sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name" vibe of the crowd itself. The whole event practically screamed "quintessential college town."

For their part, the B-52's brought the party. Schneider's speaksinging delivery, one of the most recognizable in all of pop music, still sounds great. Kate Pierson's pipes are stunning despite three-and-a-half decades of wear, and Wilson and Strickland strut like it's the Seventies. Songs like "Hot Corner" and "Roam" earned massive responses, thanks in no small part to their Classic City connections, and the latter was especially emotionally resonant, pairing the group's globe-hopping past with its homecoming present. They played a handful of tracks from 2008's Funplex, and those songs went over fine, but it was clear on both sides that this was going to be a hits showcase.

Then there's that moment when "Love Shack," a ubiquitous cultural force, karaoke hall-of-famer, wedding dance-floor igniter and grocery-store staple, comes to life in front of a group of people and the group goes completely bonkers. Even the most steadfast of the crowd's non-dancing throng seemed moved to stand up and shake it, if only just a little bit. The security guards even lost it.

With the recent disbanding of R.E.M., the B-52's became the last remaining vestige of Athens' college-rock origins, the final band from that first wave of talent that gave the town its first real musical presence, opening the metaphorical door for future bands as varied as Neutral Milk Hotel, Widespread Panic, Of Montreal and Drive-By Truckers. That history is not lost, it seems, even in one of Athens' latest buzzy acts, Tunabunny, who opened the show with its noisy, art-damaged pop, receiving welcoming and rapturous applause in return for its unhinged music.

"Athens is a great place for music, and it's not always perfect," Tunabunny singer/guitarist Brigette Herron said as a precursor to the final song of the band's set. "We have the B-52's to thank for that."

Her sentiment echoed that of  Strickland earlier in the day, sitting behind the stage on which she spoke those words. "I remember listening to that Patti Smith song,'" Strickland said. "She had this lyric, 'Dip into the sea of possibilities.' That was my mantra in those early days. Anything can happen. You can do it."

Set List
"Eyes Wide Open"
"Mesopotamia"
"Private Idaho"
"Lava"
"Give Me Back My Man"
"Funplex"
"Topaz"
"Roam"
"52 Girls"
"Love in the Year 3000"
"Too Much to Think About"
"Hot Corner"
"Pump"
"Whammy Kiss"
"Love Shack"

"Planet Claire"
"Party Out of Bounds"
"Rock Lobster"

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

Amazon Music and MP3 Center

Read more »

The B-52's Celebrate 35 Years With Hometown Party

The B-52's Celebrate 35 Years With Hometown Party in Athens, Georgia.

They didn't really know what they were doing – didn't even totally know how to play their instruments, if they were being honest. But back in 1977, a couple of the band's friends were holding a Valentine's Day house party at a place on Milledge Ave. in Athens, Ga., just across the street from where the Dunkin' Donuts sits today. The B-52's – a band that would christen itself after the beehive hairdo that bore an aesthetic similarity to a Boeing-designed strategic bomber – were playing for 25 or so people, who were dancing like crazy. The band set up in the foyer, the audience was in the living room. It was cramped, but there was a keg. Someone was taking photographs of hands, feet, dresses, legs. The floor was about to cave in.

"We weren't really a band at the time," Keith Strickland tells Rolling Stone. "But Fred [Schneider, B-52's frontman] said we were, so then we had to be one, and we had to shore up some songs. I think we [ended up] with about six, which were 'Rock Lobster,' 'Planet Claire,' 'Lava,' 'Killer Bees' and 'Strobe Light.'"

Last night, just about a mile and a half from that house, and 35 years nearly to the day of that very first, awkward, performance-art of a performance, the B-52's played the Classic Center in downtown Athens. But it felt less like a couple thousand people housed within a fancy venue and more like a gathering of old friends – ones who came bedecked in pinstriped blazers with leopard-print lapels, colored wigs, and lights draped or attached all over their bodies, but old friends nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly, it was also a tribute night of sorts to Athens itself. From local upstarts Tunabunny, who were recommended as an opener to Schneider by the folks at legendary local record store Wuxtry, to the local Terrapin Beer Company brews flowing in and out of flimsy plastic cups, to the "sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name" vibe of the crowd itself. The whole event practically screamed "quintessential college town."

For their part, the B-52's brought the party. Schneider's speaksinging delivery, one of the most recognizable in all of pop music, still sounds great. Kate Pierson's pipes are stunning despite three-and-a-half decades of wear, and Wilson and Strickland strut like it's the Seventies. Songs like "Hot Corner" and "Roam" earned massive responses, thanks in no small part to their Classic City connections, and the latter was especially emotionally resonant, pairing the group's globe-hopping past with its homecoming present. They played a handful of tracks from 2008's Funplex, and those songs went over fine, but it was clear on both sides that this was going to be a hits showcase.

Then there's that moment when "Love Shack," a ubiquitous cultural force, karaoke hall-of-famer, wedding dance-floor igniter and grocery-store staple, comes to life in front of a group of people and the group goes completely bonkers. Even the most steadfast of the crowd's non-dancing throng seemed moved to stand up and shake it, if only just a little bit. The security guards even lost it.

With the recent disbanding of R.E.M., the B-52's became the last remaining vestige of Athens' college-rock origins, the final band from that first wave of talent that gave the town its first real musical presence, opening the metaphorical door for future bands as varied as Neutral Milk Hotel, Widespread Panic, Of Montreal and Drive-By Truckers. That history is not lost, it seems, even in one of Athens' latest buzzy acts, Tunabunny, who opened the show with its noisy, art-damaged pop, receiving welcoming and rapturous applause in return for its unhinged music.

"Athens is a great place for music, and it's not always perfect," Tunabunny singer/guitarist Brigette Herron said as a precursor to the final song of the band's set. "We have the B-52's to thank for that."

Her sentiment echoed that of  Strickland earlier in the day, sitting behind the stage on which she spoke those words. "I remember listening to that Patti Smith song,'" Strickland said. "She had this lyric, 'Dip into the sea of possibilities.' That was my mantra in those early days. Anything can happen. You can do it."

Set List
"Eyes Wide Open"
"Mesopotamia"
"Private Idaho"
"Lava"
"Give Me Back My Man"
"Funplex"
"Topaz"
"Roam"
"52 Girls"
"Love in the Year 3000"
"Too Much to Think About"
"Hot Corner"
"Pump"
"Whammy Kiss"
"Love Shack"

"Planet Claire"
"Party Out of Bounds"
"Rock Lobster"

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

Amazon MP3 Download Center

Read more »