Better Living Through Chemistry by Fatboy Slim

Better Living Through Chemistry, the first album Norman Cook released under the Fatboy Slim name, arrived in September 1996 on Skint in Britain and Astralwerks in America. Cook had already lived several musical lives by then: bassist in the Housemartins, the brains behind Beats International, a stint in Freak Power and house records under other aliases, all after moving to Brighton to chase dance music.

Here he throws the lot in the blender. This is big beat at its most gleeful, samples scavenged from every corner of the record crate, processed rhythms and shouted slogans bolted onto tunes with honest pop shapes. "Going Out of My Head" was the one that crossed the Atlantic, making this the first Fatboy Slim record to chart outside the UK, and back home it went gold. You've Come a Long Way, Baby followed in 1998.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.