"Right Here, Right Now" is a song by British big beat musician Fatboy Slim, released on 19 April 1999 as the fourth single from his second studio albumYou've Come a Long Way, Baby. The song reached number two on the UK Singles Chart, behind Westlife's single "Swear It Again" for one week. It was voted by Mixmag readers as the tenth-greatest dance record of all time.
Composition
The basic string melody of the song was sampled from the James Gang song "Ashes, the Rain & I". The lyrics "right here, right now" are a sample of Angela Bassett's voice saying "This is your life, right here, right now!" from the film Strange Days at the 1:43:21 mark. The album version of "Right Here, Right Now" ends with a radio talk between Bradley Jay, a DJ of the WBCN radio station of Boston, and a Fatboy Slim fan called Brad.
Music video
The music video, created by Hammer & Tongs, is an elaborate homage to the famous opening sequence of the French educational series Once Upon a Time... Man. It shows a timeline depicting the entire process of human evolution condensed into three and a half minutes. The beginning of the music video is set "350 billion years ago", and starts with a single celled eukaryote in the ocean evolving into a jellyfish, a pufferfish, and then a predatory fish. It manages to eat a smaller fish before leaping up onto dry land. With a dinosaur visible in the background and an insect in front, it stays still for a few seconds before setting off and eating the insect. The land-fish evolves into a small alligator as it enters a forest. It sees a tall tree, which it climbs up. Its body is obscured by the tree as its hands visibly evolve until it arrives at the top as a baboon-like ape. It jumps from the tree into an icy landscape, enduring a blizzard as it evolves into a larger, gorilla-like ape. At the end of a large cliff, the ape beats its chest as the camera zooms out to show a vast desert. The ape jumps onto the ground, where it has evolved into a primate resembling an homo erectus. A large storm blows away much of its hair, turning it into a human. The human runs faster and puts on some trousers and a T-shirt with the logo "I'm #1 so why try harder". When fully clothed, it turns into a modern human with a beard. The man walks through a city environment and eats a hamburger, he pulls off the beard and morphs into the obese character depicted on the cover of the album. He finally sits down on a bench at night, at which point the video ends.
, Arsenal, Inter Milan as well as many other teams play this song when their players walk out of the tunnel prior to a match. On 8 October 2019, Fatboy Slim played a part of environmental activist Greta Thunberg's United Nations speech in a mashup with the song. The song is also featured in the film Big Fat Liar. The song was used for the opening sequence of the pilot episode for the television seriesThird Watch. The song was used for the sequence showcasing Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals during Episode X of the Netflix/ESPN sports documentary miniseries "The Last Dance".
