Fatboy Slim says his ex wife Zoe Ball saved him from alcoholism when she threatened to leave him unless he got sober.
The superstar DJ, whose real name is Norman Cook, was married to Zoe for 17 years and the pair have remained close friends.
Norman has now revealed just how influential the TV and radio star, 55, was on him at the height of his alcohol struggles.
Norman, 62, checked into rehab in 2009, ten years into his marriage, and has revealed his wake up call came when Zoe quietly confronted him.
‘That was my wake-up moment,’ he recalled. ‘There had been tons of people shouting at me before, but it was whispered very quietly in the end.’
Reflecting on his recovery during an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, he said he realised when he was in recovery that he had sought help ‘just in time.’
Fatboy Slim says his ex wife Zoe Ball saved him from alcholism after she threatened to leave him unless he got sober (pictured in 2001)
Norman, 62, checked into rehab in 2009, ten years into his marriage, and has revealed his wake up call came when Zoe quietly confronted him
‘It’s like a parasite,’ he added of alcoholism. ‘It protects its own. It knows that if you quit, it won’t have anywhere to live anymore, so it will do things to you to keep you.’
‘Probably the last year of my drinking, I wasn’t really enjoying it, and things were starting to fall off in my life.’
‘No, absolutely not,’ he said when asked whether becoming sober had been straightforward. ‘Probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I couldn’t have done it without going to rehab.’
‘I needed someone to bash into my head for a month. You know, “you’ll die, and you’ll be in misery if you don’t stop doing this”.’
Six-time Grammy nominee Norman still struggled after coming out of treatment, admitting he was terrified to perform without a drink.
‘For the first five shows, I was so paralysed and rigid with fear, I couldn’t dance, and I couldn’t enjoy it,’ he said. ‘I was thinking: “What are you actually doing? Why are you going to play that record next? And why are they going to react to it?”‘
He said a ‘beautiful night in Japan’ helped him to overcome his fears as the crowd were ‘just really excitable’, and he realised his job was about making the crowd happy. ‘Everything sort of fitted into place,’ he explained.
Zoe and Norman began their romance in 1997 after they met in Ibiza and they married two years later at Babington House in Somerset.
‘That was my wake-up moment,’ he recalled. ‘There had been tons of people shouting at me before, but it was whispered very quietly in the end’ (pictured on their wedding day in 1999)
After welcoming son Woody in 2000, they split briefly in 2003 when it emerged she had an affair with a close friend of her husband’s DJ Dan Peppe.
Following the revelation Norman said he still loved Zoe and would take her back, as long as she promised never to see Peppe again.
The Praise You hitmaker confessed at the time: ‘I still love her. If you love someone you’ll forgive them.’
They reconciled and welcomed daughter Nelly in 2010. However in September 2016 they announced their official separation. In a joint statement, the pair wrote: ‘With great sadness we are announcing that we have separated.’
Opening up on her ‘painful’ divorce earlier this year, Zoe confessed: ‘You try everything and then think this is not working.
‘The anticipation of just coming out with it and saying to your partner “right it’s the time”. It’s so scary because it’s overwhelming on all fronts, you’re worrying about the kids, you’re worrying about your partner, you’re worrying about you and how it will all work out.
‘Something I can tell you from personal experience is, yes it is a lot to go through but you will come out the other side of it.’
