Oh Yes They're The Great Offenders: An interview with fat White Family

Over a muffled phoneline, on a Wednesday afternoon, with the clink of pint glasses pinging in the background, Fat White Family’s singer, Lias Saoudi, exhales deeply before confessing his disgust at 5am flights to Vienna.

“I can’t do it, man,” he confides about early starts. “It does my fucking nut in. Whenever I start to sleep, I imagine I’m just going to combust. Unless I’ve got a bottle of Xanax, I can’t get my head down. I got some in Vienna, then I had to get some speed to be able to do the fucking gig. I was just running on fumes, man.

“Because I’d done the speed, I couldn’t sleep again that night. By the time I got back to England, I was just like, right, I’m going home for two d.ays, I am not answering the phone, I’m not speaking to anybody. I don’t wanna hear the words ‘Fat White Family’.

“I’m just gonna lay around in self-pity, maybe have a little cry at some point and watch a bunch of videos by up-and- coming bands, who I don’t think are as good as us – and try and cheer myself up about the fact that I haven’t got any money.”

He laughs sardonically. “My tour manager earns more than I do,” he says.
And then he laughs again.

In January, Fat White Family released their second album Songs For Our Mothers. It’s a considerably gentler record than their debut LP, Champagne Holocaust. It doesn’t sound exactly characteristic, coming from a band who have been both touted and reviled as UK indie’s newest rock ’n’ rollhorror show.

“I guess that’s probably the drugs that most of the band were on at the time,” Saoudi confesses. “I think there were a lot of downers going on. That’s never really been my cup of tea: I prefer to get more active with my drug consumption. But each to their own. At that point in time, the blood had slowed down a little bit.”

Naming a song ‘Goodbye Goebbels’ – after the second most notorious Nazi ever – has created an inevitable backlash. But for Saoudi, the point of the song is straightforward.

“It’s just a love song,” he explains. “I wanted to write a love song. That’s how it came out – and I think it’s a fairly stand-up love song. I think it tugs at some heart strings. I’ve listened to it a lot. I can still listen to it now. I think it does the job and I think if anyone’s got a problem with the content, then they should address what it is they expect popular music to be.

“For those who say it’s juvenile, or whatever, I don’t think anyone else is asking that question. And if they are, they’re not on any kind of pedestal like we are, so I consider it my responsibility to raise that issue. I don’t write a song like that in order to inspire a backlash. I write a song like that because it’s interesting to me – and because that’s what came up at the time.”

He is, however, at pains to put it in context.

“Antagonism isn’t my only setting,” he insists. “It might be my default setting – but as you’re given a bit more breathing room, in the music fucking game, you can explore different avenues. The backlash you get undercut with is, ‘Oh, it’s juvenile’ or ‘You’re trying to shock people and I’m not shocked’, blah, blah, blah. I couldn’t give a shit. I’m not a particularly shocking person. I don’t walk around wearing slabs of meat, and I’m not really confrontational: it’s not my game.

“I just like those things: they’re interesting to me and when I write about them. I don’t really care what people say, it doesn’t make any difference to me. It seems to be impossible to really get anywhere in the music business anyway, so it makes very little difference whether you’re successful in inverted commas, or not, these days.”

The other song on Songs For Our Mothers that has raised eyebrows is 'When Shipman Decides'.

“Of course it’s about Harold Shipman,” says Saoudi. “The whole lyric’s about a woman going into a waiting room. Again, it’s a kind of opium thing going. And the whole thing’s about abusive relationships, neglect – that’s the kind of continuity in the album for me, lyrically.”

Their penchant for naming songs after genocidal murderers and serial killers aside, Fat White Family’s reputation as one of modern rock’s most notorious risk-taking outfits derives from their infamous live performances. A whistle-stop tour of highlights includes: band members playing guitar with their cocks hanging out; the singer smearing himself with butter, or even faeces; and throwing a pig’s head at a vegan fan. I could go on, but let’s just say that these escapades are the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Is it always a spontaneous thing when mayhem erupts on stage? “Oh yeah, absolutely,” states Saoudi. “There’s no plan. That would be a bit lame, wouldn’t it? Like, ‘This is the bit of the set where you get your cock out’. No.”

Saoudi points out that, on occasion, he does the complete opposite to getting naked on stage.

“Sometimes I put on layers when I do a gig. I’ll start with a T-shirt, then I’ll put on a jumper, then I’ll put on another jumper, then I’ll put on like a waistcoat, then I’ll put on a jacket. Sometimes I do it the other way around. But people don’t report that, so I look like this cheap trick. It’s not fair.

“People need to start writing about the layer-up performances, cause those are tough man (laughs). By the time you get to Disneyland and you’re jumping around like a prick and you’ve got three jackets on, it’s not good. You’ve got three jackets and two hats on and you try and get your shoes into a wellington boot.”

The singer chuckles loudly again, before lamenting the fact that so much of today’s music is hopelessly watered down. Fat White Family are, he insists, completely different to their peers.

“I think we differ in never having attempted to make it anywhere. And when we did make it anywhere, we made it as difficult as possible for ourselves to make it anywhere further,” he riffs. “I’m just not concerned with careerism. We probably could, if we tried, get ourselves a fucking single on Radio 1, push ourselves into some kind of mainstream arena, for an indie band. Possibly, make a few pennies, as well, doing it.

“But nobody in the band has anywhere to live. We’re working all the time, we still have nothing and that’s because we’ve chosen to do it our way. I think we could have made things easier on ourselves. And also because, most of the other indie bands around, roughly at our level – I guess Wolf Alice, or Slaves, or Royal Blood – are no longer on our level. But all these people we played gigs with, on festivals and tours, let’s face it, they’re all dogshit. It’s music for 11-year-old girls, man. Which is an insult to 11-year-old girls, actually.”

You don’t feel that they’re pushing the envelope in any way?

“Do you feel like they’re pushing the envelope in any way?” Saoudi retorts. “Even remotely? It’s all big industry money, packaged as indie music and it’s sold to kids as something edgy and unique and idiosyncratic, which is a lie. It’s fundamentally a lie. You only have to look at the photographs of these people to know that. And once you start hitting on the music, it gets 10 times worse.

“There is good music being made by people in this country but it’s all being made by middle-aged men. There’s Richard Dawson, or the Sleaford Mods, or Meat Raffle. There’s genuinely good stuff being made – but it’s generally by people of 40 or over. Which is an unusual twist of events in the history of the medium.”

To my surprise, as we come to the end of the conversation, the singer tells me he grew up in Ireland. “In Tyrone,” he beams. “I did high school in Cookstown. That is one hell of a town.

“My mom married another Irish fella. I lived in Galway when I was little as well. My dad had a job out there. It’s nice out there man. Galway’s a beautiful part of the world.”

As we share our mutual admiration for the West Coast of Ireland, Saoudi whispers nostalgically: “I wouldn’t mind getting back there some day.”

If they do, Fat White Family might just redefine the meaning of the term The Wild Atlantic Way...