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

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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. How much time had I spent with that man's voice rattling through my skull? I had to abandon his music at the start of my recording career because I couldn't help but imitate the guy whenever I Saul Adamczewski performing with Fat White Family on the John Peel stage at Glastonbury in 2014. Photograph: Ollie Millington/WireImage 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!” I think that’s always going to be the case. That’s part of your job, isn’t it? You’ve signed up for that and you can’t really complain when it all goes west because you have decided that everyone can live vicariously through you for a bit.

Campbell, Brian (19 February 2016). "Fat White Family frontman Lias looking forward to Irish 'homecoming' gigs". The Irish News . Retrieved 7 May 2021. Covering not just the ten-year history of Fat White Family, but also singer Lias Saoudi’s family roots in Algeria and his life growing up in Northern Ireland with his younger brother Nathan, Ten Thousand Apologies is unapologetic. The book jumps from evocatively written third-person prose (alongside his bandmates, Saoudi’s parents both have POV chapters) to Saoudi’s bluntly hilarious recollections of the band’s numerous acts of depravity. 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.” The band, fronted by Southampton-born [1] and Castlegar/ Ayr/ Cookstown-raised Lias Kaci Saoudi, [2] formed in 2011. Lead guitarist Saul Adamczewski was previously the frontman of indie pop band the Metros, which also featured Fat White Family's bass player, Joe Pancucci. [3] Nathan Saoudi previously played guitar with his older brother Lias in their former group, The Sauodis before becoming the keys player of Fat White Family. Adam Harmer (guitarist) had been a solo artist before joining the original six-piece lineup which also featured Dan Lyons on drums.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. 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

Songs for Our Mothers is out now on Fat Possum Records. Fat White Family tour the UK 20 Feb - 9 March. It all makes for an entertaining read, but you had to live it. Having to sit down and remember some of that stuff must have been difficult? You’re in a state of euphoric thoughtlessness. I considered myself to be a performance artist. We’d had 10 years of landfill indie by the time we came around. It was just poseurs and middle-class borelords from coast to coast. I felt: can’t the stage be reclaimed as a space for confrontation and stuff that’s challenging and how far can you actually go? Because my life was in complete disarray, I had absolutely nothing to lose, so it didn’t matter how badly I disgraced myself: the worse, the better. That was combined with a sudden feeling onstage of: ‘We’re all in the mood for this.’ People relished it. I haven’t done it in years, and I don’t want to return to that carry-on, but I stand by that it was worth exploring.” On 10 March 2014, Fat White Family issued their first single, "Touch the Leather", on Hate Hate Hate Records. [5]

The band’s third album, “Serfs Up!,” had just made the Top 20 here, and the group was returning from a photo shoot at a nearby children’s playground, where it had been instructed to vacate the merry-go-round. This was very much in keeping with its image as naughty misfits from London’s grotty underbelly. Obviously, he was in the throes of serious drug addiction at the time, but Adamczweski is painted in a very bad light on multiple occasions. Did he have anything to say about that after he read it? He was a surprisingly good sport about it. I think it was a difficult read for him because a lot of that stuff is dark and painful. He could have been the one person that could have just been, like: “No, I don’t want that out in the public sphere.” And he would have been well within his rights, but he was more like, “Nah, it should be nastier. It was much worse!” If he had a criticism, it was that it’s not dark enough. It’s also getting the full picture of a character. 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.