Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure

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No, but we've got crystal meth, you'll have to trek up the hill for a hit though, it’s frowned upon down here,’ replied the Landlord. Lias (to me): “He’s edging towards the Brian Wilson-recluse stereotype. He just wants to be in a wooden box with a microphone.” On 10 March 2014, Fat White Family issued their first single, "Touch the Leather", on Hate Hate Hate Records. [5]

scrawny yelp as the whole of his group took to their feet in violent protest. Nathan was the one wearing the smirk now, and suddenly it was Brixton that was pissing itself while Salford spat venom. A slanging match ensued between the two parties. Threats Talking about Yoko Ono, there’s a memorable section in your memoir where you break into her room in your friend and collaborator Sean Lennon’s house while on acid. Breaking in is your second choice after rejecting your first idea of thinking it would be funny to kill him… Stripe, Adelle; Saoudi, Lias (16 February 2022). Ten Thousand Apologies. White Rabbit Books. ISBN 9781474617840. Feet comes on like a dirty disco banger while Work is peppered with urgent synths and strobe-lit screaming. The collective energy of the six psychically linked Fat Whites is sounding all but unstoppable tonight. All good things have to come to an end though so they see us off with a rabble-rousing run through the much beloved, Is It Raining In Your Mouth? A seedy and suitably sweaty celebration full of grimy jangle-pop euphoria. Oh my, what a show.There is also a tribute to sometime band guitarist Dale Barclay, who died of an unrelated brain cancer, which is beautifully written and moving as Lias helplessly watches his friend struggle with a serious illness.

Lead vocalist Lias Saoudi co-wrote the biography with author Adelle Stripe, and is described in a press release as "a music book that barely features any music, a biography as literary as any novel, and a confessional that does not seek forgiveness." Campbell, Brian (19 February 2016). "Fat White Family frontman Lias looking forward to Irish 'homecoming' gigs". The Irish News . Retrieved 7 May 2021. I was glad I invited her. She looked like she was having a ball. But I was also wishing that I hadn’t. The rest of the afternoon was an absolute blur. Mark, who was sat right next to me, began quizzing me about the group. ‘Was that you up there just now? All that screaming like, that was top that, sounded like the Seeds or something…’

Huge amounts. I’d have to wait until most of the people involved are dead before everybody gets the redux version because it would completely ruin everybody’s lives. This is the rated PG version. Only ‘cause you probably can’t give zeroes! I think he’d had some scrape with the journalist beforehand. Not to defend that record, which was made by 18-year-olds in the deep end of indie landfill.” Yoko Ono, Randy [Jones] from the Village People….is [The Human League’s] Phil Oakey on there? Oh, and Rebecca Taylor, aka Self Esteem. Quite the cast!”

Adamczewski’s influence has tended to come from his interest in abrasive music and extreme culture in general; Nathan made the band more self-sufficient (he was the driving force behind them setting up their Champzone studio in Sheffield’s Attercliffe district) and pushed them in a more polished, pop direction. Adamczewski is diplomatic about this, to a degree. “I wrote songs to fit on Serfs Up!, so there was something kind of inorganic about that. I didn’t like the way the label and management pushed to make Serfs Up! cleaner and poppier at every given opportunity, but to be fair, I did want to go in that direction myself. Though I do sometimes look at Alex when he’s doing a flute solo and think: how did this happen?” I have written a book called Good Pop, Bad Pop, which is based around the objects I found in the loft of a house I used to live in. Objects I collected over the course of a lifetime & then left to gather dust in the dark. Why? Am I a hoarder? Or did I think I was laying things away “for a rainy day”?But “Ten Thousand Apologies” is so much more than a story of artistic hedonism (however gut-wrenchingly gripping those sections are). It is also a story about immigration and integration, about class politics and the (often self-defeating) struggle for identity. The chapters on Saoudi’s father Bashir, and his journey from rural Algeria to build a new life in England and Ireland, are some of the most insightful descriptions I’ve ever read about the immigrant experience. The sections on Saoudi’s childhood as a second-generation immigrant in loyalist Cookstown, Co. Tyrone – where he was relentlessly bullied and racially abused – give more perspective on sectarianism than a hundred histories of The Troubles. And this is even without mentioning the wonderful description of having a life-changing epiphany while being forced to listen to Ronan Keating while working a summer job in a Dungannon meat factory. Lias saw no live music when he was growing up, other than the occasional pub session with local folk musicians. He was bored. He read Matthew Collings’s This Is Modern Art and decided to move to London. When his older brother went to art school in Leeds, Lias saw that it could be done; he applied to the Slade School of Fine Art, and got in. But he didn’t like it, and left. Their second album, Songs for Our Mothers, was released in 2016 by the Without Consent label. [8] [9] Lias Saoudi described the album as an attempt to "really to get at the shittiness lurking in the core of my own soul, and in everybody else's." [10] It was promoted with a single for "Whitest Boy on the Beach", [11] which was later chosen for the closing credits of the 2017 film T2 Trainspotting. to seeing a famous landmark or monument for the first time at the end of a lengthy expedition. Bathed in the same weary afternoon light as everything else, it seemed almost indecent in its

What’s interesting to me is that despite their differences, both bands consider themselves to be of the left. Fat White Family’s 2019 album Serfs Up! ruminates on the middle-class trappings sold to us by the ideology of social mobility. Tastes Good With the Money is particularly resonant for its wit and catchiness, and features an incisive interlude from guest vocalist Baxter Dury: “Gotta fathom your own legacy / Slimming shakes / Bathing on the right side of surprises / And a big mushroom cloud/ For the middle classes / Leaves a beautiful shape / For you to project your fears on to.” Show me a funnier and more withering summation of the red scare and status anxiety that defines today’s centrist factions. Are Fat White Family “an invitation, sent by misery, to dance to the beat of human hatred”? Are they leading us on a journey “from the blinding white heat of a midday Mediterranean shore to the embattled boudoir of Ike and Tina Turner, from the clotted grey of Dr Harold Shipman’s waiting room to the final hour of the Third Reich in the Berlin bunker”? God, I do hope so. Like a tragicomic penny dreadful dreamed up by a mutant hybrid of Jean Genet, the Dadaists and Mark E. Smith, the Fat Whites' story is a frequently jaw-dropping epic of creative insurrection, narcotic excess, mental illness, wanderlust, self-sabotage, fractured masculinity, and the ruthless pursuit of absolute art. Apart from yourself, name all four vocalists who appear on The Moonlandingz (your side project with Sheffield’s Eccentronic Research Council) 2017 ‘Interplanatory Class Classics’ album.Clements, Jaymz (25 January 2016). "Fat White Family - Songs For Our Mothers". Rolling Stone Australia. Archived from the original on 28 January 2016 . Retrieved 25 January 2016. The cowardice at the core of my being burned more fiercely than ever. He'd needlessly humiliated my little brother in front of everybody, and I just stood there dazed, wrapped in silence. Nathan Basically the whole of the last ten years, it wasn’t an accident, it was consciously lowering the bar, lowering expectations to a chronic level of dismay, and then even an average couple of paragraphs will seem slightly impressive.” Saoudi then went on to describe the book as a work of ‘”sex therapy,” adding, “It’s part manual, part confessional, but that’s all I can say about it now. It’s a handbook. A handbook confessional!”