If dance music is dead, someone forgot to tell Fatboy Slim and the million or more people who have been to his gigs in the past two years.

Two summers ago 250,000 people flocked to Brighton for his second Big Beach Boutique and in March this year in Rio De Janeiro 360,000 Brazilians turned up to hear him play.

On Monday, September 13 it all starts again with the release of his new single Slash Dot Slash, taken from his new album Palookaville which is released on Monday, October 4.

The following month A One Way Ticket To Palookaville Tour concludes at Cardiff University on Saturday, October 23.

Palookaville is his first album in four years since the multi-platinum Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars.

"What's Palookaville? Palookaville is a mythical, nonsense destination coined by Marlon Brando," explains Norman Cook.

Obviously sensing a change in the water and perhaps acknowledging that dance, if not dead, is at least flagging, he has changed tack.

Rather than the sample-based songs that first made Fatboy famous, Cook decided he wanted to work with real musicians.

"My biggest inspiration was probably the time I spent with Blur," said Cook, who last year produced two tracks for the band's Think Tank album.

"In the past, I've been used to working alone in the studio, slaving over a hot computer, trying to make music that had a human feel.

"Being around Blur reminded me that sometimes, all you need is humans.

"It's a lot quicker and a lot more fun and because you can bounce ideas around, you end up a sum of parts that is greater than what you could have achieved on your own.

"So I guess that was the gateway to Palookaville."

It must have taken Norman back to his days on bass in The Housemartins from 1984 to 1988. Him and three other Hull-ites, Paul Heaton, Stan Cullimore and Hugh Whitaker, won over a massive audience with their socialist songs and inspirational live performances.

They became household names with a cover of The Isley Brothers' Caravan of Love but their success was damped by a bizarre tabloid campaign which labelled them fake working class, gay, and a threat to the Queen!

They split, and Cook became a DJ.

Now He's just entered another new phase in his artist career with Palookaville.

It's the first time he has made a real distinction between Fatboy the DJ and Fatboy the artist.

As Palookaville began to take shape, the plan wasn't just to work with other people, but to fully collaborate, using real instruments instead of samples and write more traditionally-structured songs.

They would still be set to dance rhythms, but this time, they would have verses, choruses, bridges and middle eights.

They would have Cook playing bass guitar but it would be the collaborations that would give the album its edge.

The first song completed last autumn was Long Way From Home, a collaboration with new, Brighton-based band Jonny Quality.

"They sound like The Stray Cats having sex with the Beastie Boys with the Jam watching," said Cook. "They sent me a demo, I went to see them play and loved them, so I gave them a backing track I had and asked them to help write a song over it.

"That turned out to be the key for the whole album. It's a proper song with verses and choruses, backing vocals and guitars. In fact, it was the first time there had ever been a real instrument on a Fatboy Slim song."

The same week, Cook invited his old friend Justin Robertson down to his studio to work on the track that would become Push And Shove.

Both played guitar, Robertson sang what Cook describes as "a Manchester-style vocal, like Stone Roses or Happy Mondays".

From there on, Cook was confident enough to push the Fatboy sound in different directions.

He flew rapper Lateef from Latyrx and DJ Shadow's Quannum Collective over from San Francisco to guest on two tracks - future single Wonderful Night, which sets an hypnotic Lateef rap (and lyrics about mingers, supermodels and Dave Beckham) to the album's funkiest tune, and cowboy-rap track The Journey, boasting what may be the world's first rap in 3/4 time.

"Lateef was the only rapper I could think of that could have pulled that off," said Cook.

There were two further collaborations to come: a cover of The Steve Miller Band's The Joker with old Fatboy cohort Bootsy Collins and Put It Back Together, featuring Damon Albarn, a song begun at a drunken wrap party for Think Tank in Devon.

"We finished it later in Brighton, when he flew over from Spain between dates with Blur," said Cook. "He was knackered, poor guy, and he actually fell asleep with his head on the desk. We'd wake him up, get him to sing another part in a certain way, then he'd fall asleep again. That's the sign of a real pro!"

One of the last tracks to materialise was Slash Dot Slash.

"The title is just a comment on this new language people seem to have," he explains. "I don't understand it myself, but then I don't even own a computer. Well, I do, the Atari in my studio, but no-one ever sent me an email on that."

* For more info surf to www.fatboyslim.net.