Fatboy Slim has said he felt paralysed and “rigid with fear” at the prospect of DJing sober after spending time in rehab to deal with his alcohol addiction.

The artist, whose real name is Norman Cook, referred to his alcoholism as a parasite and said getting sober was “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done” during an appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs with Lauren Laverne.

He said he was prompted to address his problem after his wife at the time, the radio DJ Zoe Ball, said she would leave him if he did not stop drinking. “That was my wakeup moment. There had been tons of people shouting at me before, but it was whispered very quietly in the end.

“Addiction is such a weird disease and it’s like a parasite, 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.”

He checked into a rehab facility in 2009 and has since been sober for almost 15 years. While in rehab, it dawned on him he had sought help “just in time”, he said.

Asked if he had found it easy to quit, he said: “No, absolutely not. Probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done … 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’.”

He said the anxiety he felt when returning to the stage to perform sober took some time to abate. “For the first five shows, I was so paralysed and rigid with fear, I couldn’t dance, and I couldn’t enjoy it. 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 said.

Having performed with the Housemartins alongside Paul Heaton, who would go on to form the Beautiful South, Cook rose to prominence as Fatboy Slim in the 1990s. He released a series of club hits that included Praise You, The Rockafeller Skank and Right Here, Right Now.

He has received six Grammy nominations and won the 2002 Best Music Video award for Weapon Of Choice, which stars the Hollywood actor Christopher Walken as he dances through a deserted hotel lobby.

The full Desert Island Discs episode can be heard on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.