Fatboy Slim – We’ve Come A Long, Long Way Together, review: a joyous post-lockdown liberation

This, finally, felt like the life we knew – a no-holds-barred hedonistic rave with scant regard for consequences. Face coverings were nowhere to be seen – not even any late-80s acid-house revivalists togged up in Altern 8-style PPE. Social distancing and fear of one’s fellow man were checked at the door. Strangers hugged in the aisles, and grim-faced security blokes were persuaded to waltz, wiggle their bums and, grudgingly, smile.

It really was as if the pandemic had never happened, and nothing had changed since superstar DJ Norman Cook last brought his Fatboy Slim show to Wembley in February 2019. But of course this full-blooded spectacle was extraordinary in the present context, and Cook rose to the occasion, presenting musical selections, vocal messages and screened images which repeatedly transmitted themes of liberation, whose relevance was felt by all.

Over one delirious house track halfway through his two-hour set, a voice commanded, “Wash your hands – Sanitizer – Stay at home – Isolate”, but soon announced, “Put your hands in the air – Now take your mask OFF!”

Who better equipped than Fatboy Slim, this nation’s most craven party starter, to finesse a Lazarus job on a UK dance culture fatally wounded by sixteen months of club closures?

Cook, 58, who has been sober since 2009, and separated from his wife Zoe Ball since 2016, struggled with lockdown. Last winter, he manned the till in his Big Beach Café in Hove, because he craved “connection with other human beings.” Come May 2021, he gratefully headlined the first trial nightclub reopening for the Government’s Events Research programme at Liverpool’s Bramley-Moore Dock.

Even after the ensuing months of tentative live music, Friday night's mind-blowing proceedings, turning Wembley’s notoriously cold 12,500-capacity hangar into one giant pulsating dancefloor, again felt like the leading edge of normality returning.

Throughout, Cook gurned, shimmied and bunny-hopped like a teenager. Performing in the round on a rotating Smiley-Miley podium, he didn’t do a great deal of live music-making, or “turntablism”, simply cueing up tracks, gleefully signposting every tumultuous crescendo, and teasing snatches of his Big Beat banger, The Rockafeller Skank.

It was all in the preparation. His bass sound alone could have blown planes from the sky, but Cook’s genius lies in his seamless juxtaposition of musics. An hour in, he nonchalantly flicked between a clattering Latin house tune called Summer Samba, and the ubiquitous riff from The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army – cheesy, improbable, but it brought the house down.

Another mash-up – in COP26 week – saw Greta Thunberg’s 2019 United Nations speech urgently morphed with Fatboy anthem Right Here, Right Now. In the aisle near me, an extravagantly refreshed young gent legged it up six rows to plant a kiss on a pregnant lady’s tummy. I left feeling, for the first time in many months, supercharged by positivity and wellbeing. May the party continue.