You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby by Fatboy Slim

You've Come a Long Way, Baby, the second Fatboy Slim album, hit British shops on Skint in October 1998, with Astralwerks handling America a day behind, and it's the record that turned Norman Cook from a club-scene name into a worldwide one. He produced it himself, and it plays like a gleeful demolition job on the idea that dance music had to be serious.

This is big beat at its most shameless and most fun: fat, rolling breakbeats, bass that hits like a wrecking ball, and hooks chopped up and looped until they lodge in your skull. "The Rockafeller Skank" is pure party-starting mayhem, "Gangster Tripping" swaggers, "Right Here, Right Now" builds its tension slowly before letting it all go, and "Praise You" turns a warm, soulful groove into the album's big singalong. Every one of those four singles landed in the top ten in Britain, and "Build It Up – Tear It Down" went out as a promo on top of that.

The album went to number one in the UK and number 34 in America, where rock radio's countdowns took to "Praise You" and "The Rockafeller Skank" as if they were guitar records. Critics loved how it sounded and how it carried itself, Cook took home a Brit Award in 1999, and the album went four times platinum in Britain and platinum in the States.

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