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What (or who) exactly is "The Brighton Port Authority"? Is it just a pseudonym of the solo artist Norman Cook (aka. Fatboy Slim), or is it a music group founded by Norman Cook?

What I found so far:

  • The Wikipedia article about Norman Cook says that "Cook founded a project called The Brighton Port Authority", and then it says "The band's first album […]".

  • In an article on billboard.com, which refers to a now deleted MySpace page of The Brighton Port Authority, it says that this page "[…] reveals the fictional back-story of the group".

  • Their website contains this fictional story ("The names of many players in the long-running BPA saga have been lost to history").

  • The Wikipedia article about their song Toe Jam says "[…] British electronic act The Brighton Port Authority".

  • Their album I Think We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat lists collaborators for each track ("The album features collaborations with […]"), so these artists can’t be the group members, right?

unor
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  • You can find that deleted MySpace page in the Wayback machine. The earliest capture is from a few weeks after the Billboard.com article https://web.archive.org/web/20080702065051/http://www.myspace.com/thebpa – Joe Germuska Mar 17 '15 at 21:55

1 Answers1

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The Brighton Port Authority is nothing more than a Norman Cook solo project. While this isn't Rap music, many Rap artists have a bevy of guest vocalists on their releases these days (usually with the words "featuring So-And-So" in the title of the individual tracks) so this isn't anything new. However, rather than release it as a Fatboy Slim CD, Norman chose to create a separate fictional entity.

This actually has worked in the past; Porcupine Tree was a completely made up group with a fictional background created by Steven Wilson, but when the project caught fire he hired musicians to tour and eventually record additional albums. The difference being that Wilson wrote and recorded everything himself.

The only article I could find that corroborates this is here. The most telling piece of the article is the very first sentence:

The Brighton Port Authority is yet one more way that Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim, aka Beats International) has found to gather world-class musical weirdos around him and collaborate with them on the creation of funky, hooky, wave-your-hands-in-the-air dance pop.

Johnny Bones
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