Freddie Fresh feat. Fatboy Slim - “Badder Badder Schwing”
Big Beat
Song released in 1998. Compilation released in 1999.
Big Beat / Breaks
Let's start this post off with a graf from the preamble of a 2018 Freddy Fresh interview, conducted by Matt Lush in Decoded Magazine:
Freddy Fresh is a name that shouldn't require an introduction. From the vast output of his multiple genre-spanning labels; Analog USA, Electric Music Foundation and Howlin' Records, to winning the ARSC Journalism Award for cataloguing every hip-hop release ever made in a single book, crafting timeless acid and electro under over 15 aliases with the likes of Thomas Heckmann, Woody McBride, Tim Taylor and Paul Birkin, and the rest, big beat with Fat Boy Slim, his soundtrack work...it goes on... yet ironically, in my experience anyway, Freddy Fresh seems to be so often underrated, unconsciously ignored, or even completely unknown in the modern electronic world.
Over the course of his career, Freddy Fresh has had his fingers lodged in many different pies. In fact, those pies are sometimes stacked on top of each other so a single finger can penetrate multiple pies at once. Fresh is a DJ's DJ who can patch together eclectic mixes of house, techno, funk, disco, breaks, hip hop, electro, and more; he's produced music across a panoply of dance genres; he's founded a bunch of different record labels; he's opened for blink-182 on tour; his music has appeared in multiple films, TV shows, and commercials; he's authored indispensable books that document hip hop's early history; he's taught DJing at a local college; and he also sells rare records. Put simply, if you're not familiar with Freddy Fresh, you should be.
Freddy Fresh first found his initial passion for music in hip hop culture, entirely thanks to a 1984 trip from his hometown of St. Paul to the Bronx. From then, he would try to ingratiate himself into the Big Apple's hip hop scene, returning once every year with hopes of impressing the right people. He wasn't all that successful, but he did land a track on a 1988 Boogie Down Productions remix album, which honored the memory of BDP's recently slain co-founder, DJ Scott La Rock. Another fun fact that links Freddy to BDP is that if you look at the cover of BDP's landmark debut album, 1987's Criminal Minded, you'll see a plaque towards the bottom lefthand corner. Know who furnished that plaque for them? Freddy Fresh. His dad owned a trophy shop and Freddy gave them the plaque during one of his yearly New York pilgrimages.
But Freddy would soon find himself gravitating towards other genres, too, like house and techno. From that Decoded interview:
I sent demos to Strictly Rhythm [top tier New York-based house label] and various labels and was always rejected. It was years later that labels like Adrenalin and Experimental stood up and took me under their wings. My first techno 12 inch was on Experimental, under my Modulator name. Maximum Pulse / Timmy's Trance in 1992, that got me into the techno scene and also got me my first international DJ gig in Paris 1993 where I played with Jeff Mills, Joey Beltram and Damon Wild... Damon Wild was the man mainly responsible for my early techno career, God Bless Him.
Freddy Fresh then became a big German techno guy. He played sets at Tresor in Berlin (the techno club of techno clubs) and released records on the legendary Frankfurt-based label, Harthouse.
However, a new current started to emerge in the UK in the mid-90s called big beat, which appeared to match with Freddy Fresh's own hip hop sensibilities. It was a strain of dance music that fused together sampled soul, funk, jazz, and rock breaks, which, along with disco, is what hip hop producers largely used to make their own beats. And when those breaks were properly combined with contemporary electronic sounds, like, for example, Roland TB-303 acid squelches, it yielded a newfangled and fun brand of BIG and brash dance tunes. Norman Cook, better known as Fatboy Slim, would emerge as the genre's rightful king, with his uniquely liberal use of bouncy and surf-twangy 50s and 60s guitar samples. And although Freddy Fresh was still an absurdly prolific techno producer in 1996, his Harthouse album, Accidentally Classic, along with a couple Harthouse 12-inches that were licensed from his own Butterbeat label, saw him trying his hand at the big beat sound, which would eventually lead to him teaming up with Norman Cook in 1998.
A March 2020 profile in Mixmag has more:
While he may have been known in France for techno releases on his Analog label, it was Freddy Fresh's releases on Butterbeat that caught the ears of Norman Cook in Brighton. He was an avid supporter of Fresh's perky updates on the hip hop sound, and that's what brought him over to the British seaside. "I got invited to play the Big Beat Boutique. That's when I first met [Cook] and then he ends up sampling my voice [for 'Fucking in Heaven'], then we worked on 'Badder Badder Schwing' together. I loved Norman because he was authentic. He did everything himself. I was like, 'this fucking guy's just like me!'. He collects breakbeats, he's an amazing DJ, he knows how to put shit together and he knows how to run 303s - and Roland 303s are really hard to program.
That co-production with Cook, "Badder Badder Schwing," would originally appear on Freddy Fresh's album, The Last True Family Man, before being released as a single the following year. The single would then turn into an unexpected British hit, earning the mostly techno producer some well-deserved commercial appeal by reaching #34 in the UK charts. "Badder Badder Schwing" can also be heard in 2002's Austin Powers in Goldmember, although it didn't end up being included on the commercially released official soundtrack.
Dipping into that Decoded interview once again for a tad more backstory to "Badder Badder Schwing":
I did have 90% of that track finished when Norman joined in and took it from a 7 to a 10 with his sheer genius.
By sampling a bunch of 60s songs, including horns and drums from Helen Reddy's "One Way Ticket," vocals and hand claps from The Routers' "Let's Go (Pony)," and more drums from Tommy Roe's "Sweet Pea," Freddy Fresh and Norman Cook were able to cobble together a fantastic piece of late 90s, dancefloor-igniting big beat. However, it would be interesting to know which 90% of the track Freddy Fresh had finished before passing it off to Cook, because the whole thing really sounds like a Fatboy Slim track from start to finish. And that's not to discredit Freddy in any way, because despite what dance music's detractors might think, it's not an easy task to make a good dance tune. But the entirety of "Badder Badder Schwing" appears to have Cook's fingerprints all over it, from his glitching, jammed-up, calling card stutters, to the way the combined horn and drum sampling sounds, to the brief, guitar-sampled detour, to the eerie and overdriven background yowling. The song's main riff is when those Helen Reddy horns play, and you'd have to assume that was part of Freddy's contribution, since according to him, the song was virtually done before he let Cook put on the finishing touches. But still, that part sounds like something Fatboy Slim would make, doesn't it? 🤷♂️ 🧐🤔
Then again, Freddy Fresh did say about Cook in that recent Mixmag profile, "the fucking guy's just like me!" so maybe they were on the same exact letter within the same exact word on the same exact page in 1998. In the end, it doesn't really matter all that much. Big beat's passed us by, but throw this on at a party (when we're allowed to party again, of course) and it's guaranteed to still go.
Check out the music video, too, which features a kid magician doing a series of tricks:
