Never doubt the ancestors – our musical forefathers were alive and well and clearly behind the decks.

Because when Fatboy Slim — born Norman Cook — rolled into the Barrowland Ballroom on the first of three sold-out nights of his Acid Ballroom tour, it felt less like a gig and more like a pagan rite conducted under a glitterball. Glasgow’s most beloved ballroom became a secular cathedral to bass, and 2,000 Glaswegians turned up ready to testify.

Cook, the Brighton beach-bum who’s been headlining festivals since half the crowd were in buggies (and before the other half were born), has always understood something the chin-strokers miss: dance music isn’t escapism, it’s evangelism. From Rio to Reykjavik, he’s flung beats across borders like confetti at a shotgun wedding. Technique — that muscular, piston-pumping hybrid of house, big beat and techno — was always about unity through velocity. On a freezing Thursday in Glasgow, it felt as revolutionary as ever.

He opened like a man who knows he owns the room — fog machines coughing out smoke, visuals snapping and fizzing behind him. Credit to the visual sorcerers — long-time collaborator Flat-e. Yes, some of it had that slightly AI-generated fever dream sheen, but in a room fuelled by strobe lights and serotonin, who’s checking the brushstrokes?

Each night on this tour boasts a different support, and tonight it was LoveFoxy — a lithe, high-octane warm-up whose set skimmed from acid house to cheeky electro edits, priming the Barras faithful like a glitter cannon being loaded. By the time Cook bounded on, the room was already simmering.

“Hi, my name is…”

The crowd: “FUNK SOUL BROTHER!”

And just like that, “The Rockafeller Skank” detonated. The Barrowlands floor — which has seen more historic sweat than a heavyweight’s gym towel — began to bounce in unison. If tectonic plates could grin, they’d look like this.

There are theatrical stunts, of course. This is Fatboy Slim, not a man hiding behind a laptop like a timid IT consultant at a wedding disco. At one point he coaxed 2,000 Glaswegian punters to sit down en masse before springing up for “Praise You” — a mass act of daft devotion that felt like performance art curated by Ned Kelly after three Red Stripes.

“I See You Baby” slinked in, shimmying its way through a teasing mash-up that nodded to David Byrne’s art-school twitch and the sleek, adrenalised remix instincts of Soulwax. It shouldn’t have worked. It absolutely did. Cook’s genius has always been this: he treats genres like distant cousins at a wedding and forces them into the same photo booth.

“Put Your Hands Up in the Air!” Is mixed in with a jungle leaning beat, and suddenly the room was a 1994 pirate radio flashback — junglists, indie kids, techno heads, office workers and wide-eyed teenagers all punching the same damp Glasgow air. Technique was born in the margins, but it’s always belonged to everyone.

“Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat” landed like a manifesto rather than a mere track. Then — because subtlety is for cowards — he lobbed in a delirious blend of “Mr Brightside” and “Born Slippy”, a union of indie disco angst and stadium-sized rave euphoria that could have curdled milk but instead turned the Barras into the happiest place on earth…

Through it all, Cook grinned like a benevolent trickster uncle who’s spiked the punch but promises you’ll thank him later. He brought Ibiza to the ballroom — not the VIP-lanyard version, but the democratic, sand-in-your-trainers spirit of it. No velvet ropes. No hierarchy. Just basslines acting as social glue.

And that’s the thing about Fatboy Slim. For three decades he’s been the pied piper of the post-tribal age, proving that dance music can dissolve class, creed, age and postcode into a single, euphoric organism. All ages were here — silver-haired ravers who remember the Hacienda, fresh-faced kids discovering the drop for the first time — united by four-to-the-floor and the promise of transcendence.

With “Funk Soul Brother” reprised like a victorious curtain call, the Barras didn’t miss a beat. Not one. The floor shook, the lights flared, and Glasgow — glorious, gallus Glasgow — reminded the rest of Britain that when it comes to communal joy, nobody does it better.

The ancestors delivered.

And Norman Cook, cult evangelist of the big beat, simply pressed play on their prophecy.

Article: Angela Canavan