Norman Cook

speaker

500 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 25 Jul

Norman Cook’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Desert Island Discs · Norman Cook, DJ and musician · 25 Jul 2026 podcast

He worked for a glass company and they were the first glass company to have a recycling plant.

And they said to him, you're going to be environmental manager.

There's this thing in Germany and Holland where people have bottle banks and you've got to talk English people into saving all their old bottles and

and then once a week going down to a car park and putting them in a skip, which seemed like quite a difficult thing to do, but he kind of pulled it off.

So, yeah, he introduced bottle banks to England.

He got the MBE for it.

Yeah, my granddad was a window cleaner, and they lived in Newcross, very working-class family, but my dad got evacuated to a place just out of St Louis,

to stay in the stables of a really rich family.

And the rich family took him under their wing, got him into a grammar school.

And when the war ended, he came back.

He's like, you know, Peter, I'd like to go to grammar school, please.

And my granddad was like, what?

So my dad went to a good school and became sort of middle class.

And I've always been kind of stuck between one generation of my family completely working class and then my dad being really middle class.

Well, second is we're harking back now to my childhood in the 60s.

So this record will always remind me of my parents.

And I was born in 1963, which is when they started.

So literally that was the soundtrack of my early years.

And then thought my uncle, Dennis, was in the Beatles.

He was in a pop band called The Fables and they used to rehearse in my nan's front room in New Cross.

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