Desert Island Discs<\/a> with Lauren Laverne.<\/p>\nHe said he was prompted to address his problem after his wife at the time, the radio DJ Zoe Ball, said she would leave him if he did not stop drinking. \u201cThat was my wakeup moment. There had been tons of people shouting at me before, but it was whispered very quietly in the end.<\/p>\n
\u201cAddiction is such a weird disease and it\u2019s like a parasite, it protects its own. It knows that if you quit, it won\u2019t have anywhere to live anymore, so it will do things to you to keep you.<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably the last year of my drinking, I wasn\u2019t really enjoying it, and things were starting to fall off in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
He checked into a rehab facility in 2009 and has since been sober for almost 15 years. While in rehab, it dawned on him he had sought help \u201cjust in time\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
Asked if he had found it easy to quit, he said: \u201cNo, absolutely not. Probably the hardest thing I\u2019ve ever done \u2026 I couldn\u2019t have done it without going to rehab. I needed someone to bash into my head for a month. You know, \u2018you\u2019ll die, and you\u2019ll be in misery if you don\u2019t stop doing this\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the anxiety he felt when returning to the stage to perform sober took some time to abate. \u201cFor the first five shows, I was so paralysed and rigid with fear, I couldn\u2019t dance, and I couldn\u2019t enjoy it. I was thinking: \u2018What are you actually doing? Why are you going to play that record next? And why are they going to react to it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
He said a \u201cbeautiful night in Japan\u201d helped him to overcome his fears as the crowd were \u201cjust really excitable\u201d, and he realised his job was about making the crowd happy. \u201cEverything sort of fitted into place,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Having performed 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 series of club hits that included Praise You, The Rockafeller Skank and Right Here, Right Now.<\/p>\n
He has received six Grammy nominations and won the 2002 Best Music Video award for Weapon Of Choice, which stars the Hollywood actor Christopher Walken as he dances through a deserted hotel lobby.<\/p>\n
The full Desert Island Discs episode can be heard on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4<\/a> from Sunday at 10am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fatboy Slim has said he felt paralysed and \u201crigid with fear\u201d at the prospect of DJing sober after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-661962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}