Troubled dance producer Fatboy Slim has cancelled this year’s epic weekender the Big Beach Boutique.
One of the nation’s biggest dance events, the Big Beach Boutique is hugely popular. An extension of the club, label and genre Big Beat, the weekender regularly attracts tens of thousands of dance fans to the South coast.
At the first ever Big Beach Boutique organisers made provisions for an estimated 60,000. However with Fatboy Slim still riding high in the charts over 250,000 flooded into Brighton for one of the biggest ever British dance events.
Fatboy Slim recently reminisced about this event to the Telegraph. “It was really exciting in the afternoon as more and more people arrived. Then still the crowds kept coming and the police said, “We’re going to have to stop this because the whole town is gridlocked and the A23’s at a standstill.” But we worked out that it would be more dangerous not to go ahead with it.”
“By the end there were 250,000 people – double the population of Brighton. It was epic: yachts all along the shoreline, a sea of waving hands as far as you could see. We’d gone to a lot of trouble to make sure it was safe but there were over twice as many people as we’d expected.”
Since then organisers have trimmed the number of fans allowed onsite with 20,000 expected to attend this summer’s Bit Beat bash.
Brighton And Hove City Council confirmed that the event was cancelled due to the large amount of people it was expected to bring to the city, reports BBC News.
However already tongues are wagging within the dance community. Fatboy Slim has always been renowned as a party animal, yet earlier this year the producer was forced to enter rehab in order to deal with an alcohol addiction.
Leaving the centre after a few days, Norman Cook has vowed to clean up his act after being forced to pull out of Austria’s massive snowboarding party Snowbombing.
The producer has previously been allowed to focus on his music. Collaborative project Brighton Port Authority released their debut album ‘I Think We’re Going To Need A Bigger Boat’ earlier this year.
Containing efforts from David Byrne, Iggy Pop, Dizzee Rascal and more the album moved through a broad range of styles. Yet even when shifting between genres the material retained a pop touch, with Norman Cook never once relying on his Fatboy reputation.
Big Beach Boutique 5 has been cancelled.
