Brexit, Bowie, Grenfell, and Burnout: 22 Minutes with the Lead Singer of Fat White Family

Just how did the English band Fat White Family—whose first record, Champagne Holocaust, featured a song titled “Bomb Disneyland” and whose follow-up included songs about serial killers and a homoerotic country tune, “Goodbye Goebbels,” written from the perspective of Hitler in the bunker—shock people this time?

By releasing a new record, Serfs Up!, that’s been variously described as “luxury pop,” “glam boogie,” and “tropical,” with strings and saxophones and touches of cocktail exotica. To say it’s a sea change from their earlier work is to understate the case. That said, what’s perhaps the band’s true trademark—their unerring instinct for speaking their own truths about the inequities and absurdities and indignations of modern British life, from class warfare on through the Grenfell Tower disaster and Brexit, for starters.

We caught up with the band’s founder and lead singer, Lias Saoudi, in Liverpool just after a low-key acoustic-type gig to support the new album. “We’ve got a little four-piece—just a keyboard, a flute, an acoustic guitar, and me,” Saoudi says. “We’re calling it Fat White Family: The Baroque—although there isn’t anything remotely baroque about it.”

Let’s start with the name: Why call yourselves Fat White Family?

It’s kind of an accidental Bowie reference: Our old manager, James Endeacott—he’s kind of a British music industry mogul, looks a bit like Simply Red—used to DJ under the name Fat White Duke, and Saul [Adamczewski, guitarist] lifted it from that. Although I don’t think Saul was aware of the Thin White Duke—he’s not really a Bowie fan. So that’s where the name comes from—with a little dose of Manson Family in there just for the full cliché.

And did anybody along the way—a manager, a label person, a close friend—try to talk you out of it or tell you that you couldn’t sell records with a name like that?

At the time, that was the last thing on our minds—it was a kind of playing-in-pubs period where we were doing it just for our own amusement. It wasn’t like we had any kind of trajectory mapped out—in fact, we would have found the very idea kind of half-laughable, half-contemptible at best in those primordial days.

Your first album was, shall we say, relentlessly hectic, and you’ve said, about your follow-up, Songs For Our Mothers, that “we really tried to go to the extremes of what’s tasteful—or even good.” And this new one is obviously an entirely different concept?

It’s all part of a grand scheme, you know: With all that other stuff, we were just trying to lower people’s expectations to a certain point so that when we finally delivered our master stroke, the reaction would be people who were not just shocked but utterly flabbergasted at the musical articulation on display.

You were playing the long con. . .

We took the road less traveled, you know?

Was there any sense that wanted to actually show people what you were really capable of?

Definitely. It’s a weird thing when you’re kind of playing for beer money and you’re all chipping in for a half gram of speed, and then all of a sudden everybody wants to book you and you’re the flavor of the month and all this kind of bullshit descends. I think it’s easy for people to get kind of “displaced,” shall we say—and let’s remember that we were already a bunch of dysfunctional egomaniacs to begin with. I suppose we took it a little bit too far in certain directions. I mean, heroin abuse is kind of like band cancer—it’s the worst fucking thing. So a whole part of the new album was about building a place that was free from all that. We moved from South London to Sheffield to try to keep the distractions and the vampires and the bullshit away and make it all about the music again. Which was how we started out—making things for fun. We didn’t care what anybody else had to say about it because maybe nobody was going to listen to it anyway. It was about getting back to a similar kind of mindset, a similar kind of openness with each other.

Why Sheffield?

I’d started working on another project up there called the Moonlandingz with Dean Honer and Adrian Flanagan, and I was using that group as a kind of holiday from Fat Whites—when everybody was getting really gnarly with the crack and the smack, it was like a holiday sitting in the studio with two middle-aged guys that just wanted to record.

Is this the band that Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono worked with you on?

Yeah—Sean Lennon coproduced a lot of our record, and Yoko sang on there as well. Let’s also not forget Randy [Jones, the cowboy from the Village People]. I think I’m most proud of that, in a way—sharing a track with Randy from the Village People.

As your sound has gotten richer and more complex, better produced and all of that, was there a fear that you’d lose your lyrical edge or somehow soften the blow of what you sing about or write about?

I really didn’t worry about that at all. Finding the balance—getting things juxtaposed just right—that’s kind of the whole package right there. And as you get older and listen to more stuff and work with more people, that voice can expand a bit—you learn to navigate different sounds and structures and instrumentation. When you start off, the first thing you can get your hands on and make a noise with is usually an electric guitar and some cheezy little amp, and somebody bangs a drum, and there you go: You’re in a band. You don’t need some mad musical lexicon. I started as a busker—rock n’ roll with a guitar and drums is just the first thing I had access to. It’s a natural evolution—our last record was sort of a heroin dirge kind of quasi-noise record, so what’s the shocking thing we could do now? Let’s try and do lush pop music. We used Yeezus by Kanye West as a rough template. We don’t sound anything like that—we never will—but there was something about that obviously decadent, luxuriant Kanye kind of thing that was the absolute opposite of the cold grey winter of Sheffield we were living in at that time, so it seemed like a funny place to start. That and the Wham! B-side “Blue”—the B-side to “Armed With Love”—these kind of sounds. There’s an escapism in that—you’re trying to create your own little dream world on every track.

You’ve said earlier that “I looked at Grenfell as, like, the monolith in Space Odyssey, sent through time by Margaret Thatcher to remind us of ourselves and how far we’d fallen from grace.” If that’s Grenfell, then what’s Brexit?

There’s a line in “Rock Fishes”—"Give 'em all the pop, but take away the fizz/ Is this Rome, Babylon, or ancient Belfast?”—that’s a direct allusion to the current political quagmire we find ourselves in. It’s looking at the fact that the UK has now been held to ransom by the last colonial outcrop of a bunch of medieval fascists known as the DUP [Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party]—they’re the guys that the Conservative Party went into a deal with in order to secure a majority in the last election. I grew up and spent my adolescence in a small town in Northern Ireland—it’s a seriously bigoted part of the world. You still have the ancient beef between Protestants and Catholics there, and it’s the only place left maybe in Europe, certainly in the UK, where abortion is still illegal.

But the whole album ended up being some kind of analogy for Brexit. The title, Serfs Up, is a nod to the populist era we find ourselves in—this idea of the oppressed masses reaching up and selecting more oppression for themselves. All that’s kind of on there, but it’s all by the by. The thing I’m interested in is modeling everything up—the political and the sexual and the personal—and stirring it all up together. That’s the way people experience life, really: A chaotic kind of glue, and everything’s bleeding into each other.

I have a lot of problems with the single-mindedness of a lot of the bands kicking about today, especially when they get dabbling in political stuff. [One recent target: The Bristol band Idles, which Saoudi called a “bunch of self neutering middle class boobs.”] They all seem to get it wrong for me: They purport their art to be about saving humanity, and to me it’s all about saving themselves. There’s a kind of shouty-man post-punk moralizing which seems to be quite popular at the moment—a bunch of guys regurgitating articles they’ve read in the Guardian. For me, it’s still about darkness and pain—and the celebration of those things, despite their obvious shortcomings.

Seeing your band live a couple years ago was something I may not ever forget. I had not ever seen most of an entire band rather unceremoniously strip entirely naked during their second song—

[laughing] Fuck, you’re right—it was the second song.

—and then play the rest of the gig that way while looking like the whole thing might come crashing to an end at any second. Do you still bring that kind of energy?

It was a bit of a phase. When I started, it was more of a warpath thing. I don’t remember the first time I ended up completely starkers onstage, but it’s a really liberating feeling. It became this thing that I really just enjoyed doing, as opposed to trying to shock everybody. You’re kind of at peak humiliation from the outset—you can’t make more of a fool of yourself. You’ve got nowhere to go but up at that stage—it’s win-win. So I’ve got no regrets about any of that—although I’m not sure if that’s exactly the flavor I’ll be signing up for this time around. But I’ll never say never: It depends on the right food, the right drinks, the right company. You end up just gettin’ into it. . .

And are you planning on coming back to New York—or the states—to tour anytime soon?

Yeah—I think at the end of September or October. New York is a city we all dearly love, but it’s also a city where, when the band goes through there, we usually come out with a slightly different lineup. New York’s one of those danger cities. Everybody gets so excited you can feel it—“We’re going to New York to play, man!”—and about six times out of ten you lose a guy there. It’s like band Vietnam: You go in there and you don’t come out the same.

We’ve done three tours in America: The first one we were just giddy, the second one we were half-jaded, and the third one was just nightmarish. We had a great reaction in the big cities—New York, Chicago—but then you do these 13-hour drives to places with seven people in Pontiac, Michigan, and it’s a tall order for anyone to sustain that, spiritually.

We definitely had an obsession with America—maybe we spent a little bit too much time there for our own good, though. Maybe we’ll be better this time. I hope we would be. I think if we treat it respectfully, maybe it’ll treat us the same way. That last time we were a little bit cavalier with some of our attitudes and our indulgences, and I think we paid the due price. We can’t complain about that now. But we’re ready to get back on the horse—no pun intended!