Sweat drips off the brows of Lias and Nathan Saoudi, the current core of the Fat White Family. Their bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Alex White, groans as he holds his head in his hands. We are crammed into a dingy room that is bare except for wooden furniture and some half-empty bottles. The space is lit by a single low-watt bulb. A fug in the air stings the eyes. And the heroin talk isn’t helping anyone.
“At least we have always tried to maintain a no-spiking policy,” sighs singer Lias, explaining his band’s “line in the sand” stance on intravenous drug use, perspiration rolling into his eyes. “There’s a certain amount of … harm reduction available to you if you only chase.”
“I’d snort it if I had the choice,” says keyboard player Nathan glumly, wiping at his forehead.
But after 20 minutes, the distressing conversation is cut short. The last few grains of sand trickle through the wall-mounted hourglass and we all file out of the roasting hot sauna cubicle. We shower one by one, before jumping into the pool of their local health spa.
“That’s why I’m so glad we’re done with all that,” says Lias, swimming backstroke, as I struggle to keep pace with him. “By the time we went our separate ways two and a half years ago [after the release of their second album Songs for Our Mothers and a headline show at Brixton Academy], every one of us had a serious hard drug or drink problem.”
“Well, the drummer was completely clean,” shouts Nathan from the other end of the pool.
“Oh yeah,” says Lias. “His problem was veganism, wasn’t it?”
I’m in Sheffield to experience a day in the life of the band, which not only includes a sauna and swim in Nether Edge, but Turkish food at the Zeugma restaurant in Highfield. During the pleasant walk from the spa to the restaurant, Lias assures me that everyone’s clean, including guitarist Saul Adamczewski. He’s back in London tonight, as is lone-wolf guitarist Adam Harmer, along with the latest members of their ever-shifting Spinal Tap-esque rhythm section.
When the band formed in a Peckham squat in 2011, Adamczewski and the charismatic and messianic Lias were the creative dynamo at the heart of the project, with significantly younger keyboard player Nathan acting as the social lubricant who enabled them to work together despite their fractious relationship. The south London band rose to notoriety with a scabrous mix of class-war politics, provocation, hard drugs and sensational word-of-mouth pub gigs. Debut album Champagne Holocaust surfaced in 2013, drawing together garage rock, cult American psych and lo-fi country. Amid the Beefheartian murk and the Fall-esque clangor, a pop sensibility began to emerge on singles such as I Am Mark E Smith and Touch the Leather in 2014. But second album Songs for Our Mothers (2016) bludgeoned any anthemic melody back into bloody submission, in favour of caustic noise (disco-influenced single Whitest Boy on the Beach notwithstanding). It seemed that FWF were the Nirvana who revelled in releasing In Utero, but felt that Nevermind was beneath them. They finessed their aesthetic of taking extreme rightwing philosophy and symbolism and then parodying it from a staunchly leftist perspective in order to comment on austerity Britain and dysfunctional relationships. It was a creative strategy that won them more enemies than friends.
Adamczewski, the most mercurial member of the group, has had lengthy absences since the Brixton show due to his problems with crack cocaine and heroin, but was welcomed back into the fold last year to work on Serfs Up!, their new album. “I’m clean now but I have ups and downs like any addict,” he tells me later over the phone. “I realise now that addiction is here to stay, one way or another.”
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?”
There appears to be some tension left simmering, not just between Nathan and Adamczewski, but also the different potential paths for the band. Do Fat White Family want to be an ambitious rock band, or freak-flag standard bearers?
Recent live shows suggest that Britain’s unhealthiest band really are getting their act together. Nathan is cagey, but concedes that his time coming off heroin after the Brixton show was “a year of misery”. He admits to almost immediately replacing his heroin habit with a damaging skunk one, all of which contributed to him having a nervous breakdown and being absent for the second half of Serfs Up!’s production.
That said, things began optimistically when they first moved to Sheffield in 2017. South Yorkshire was attractive because it was affordable: for the price of an unfurnished cupboard in London’s zone 2, they could rent an entire house in Sharrow, a nice suburb of Sheffield – and still have enough money left over to build their own studio on an industrial estate in the less-nice Attercliffe. “It was just far enough away from London to keep smack out of proceedings,” reasons Lias. “But not far enough away to stop people from coming up to visit or help out with the record.”
In the beginning, Nathan thrived on the extra responsibility, if Feet, one of the first tracks he helped write, is anything to go by. Musically, it is an Algerian rai-influenced disco track, with a respectful nod to late-period Leonard Cohen. The lyrics paint a torrid, magic realist vision of migration, triggered by Lias reading Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet’s posthumously published account of being embedded with Palestinian fighters in a Jordanian refugee camp in the 1970s. One line in particular stands out: “I hope your children wash up bloated on my shore / Caucasian sashimi in a sand nigger storm.”
Lias is half-Algerian and the band’s lyric writer. He says: “When I was about 12, we moved to Cookstown in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and [the bigotry] was on another fucking level, man. The people who lived there were vehemently racist. And this is what they called us: sand nigger.”
If the lyric refers to a troublesome memory from the Saoudi childhood, however, it is refracted through a much more recent prism. The band got sucked into a sandstorm of their own in 2017 after Boris Johnson joked at a Conservative party conference event that the Libyan city of Sirte had the potential to become a “new Dubai” – all they needed to do was clean up the dead bodies. Lias satirically tweeted in response: “Only a peppering of sand nigger carcasses to shift and we’ve got ourselves a new Dubai gentlemen! Onwards!!!”
“It was pernicious, of course, but it was intended to show exactly what I felt he was driving at in as explicit a manner as possible,” Lias says. “The next day my manager got in touch and said: ‘Yeah, there’s a race row erupted over this. Just don’t respond.’ I looked at [the story on Pitchfork] and thought: ‘I’ll fucking respond all right, man.’”
The almost permanently jocular Lias stops smiling and spits sourly. “To have an organisation like that try and brand me as a racist, having been pilloried, abused and bullied with that phrase my whole life? This absurd PC bullshit … It’s bad enough to be a victim of being called this stuff in the first place, but to have it levelled at me twice? I will use that phrase at my fucking leisure.”
I have seen several people dismiss Fat White Family as white edge-lord student music, but to what extent are they even a white group? Lias explains: “I can’t identify as white because that wasn’t my experience growing up. The implications race had for us were massive and affected everything for my family … [Racist thugs] tried to kick my big brother out of my mother when she lived in Huddersfield, you know? I understand why some people might find this terminology extreme but that kind of abuse was the reality for us and I’m not going to shy away from that as an artist. I’m not white, my dad is from Algeria. I’m British North African.” Nathan nods, laughing: “And I’m tanned Irish.”
While the first two singles on the album (Feet and Tastes Good With the Money) were written between the brothers, the pace of creation was still slow and it took Adamczewski rejoining to see the album get completed. Nathan proselytises about the potential of the band, though, to still get bigger and bigger. He states firmly that their job is like that of travelling preachers, always moving on, heading from town to town, spreading the good word. He is contemptuous of their peers. “Idles? We should crush them. It’s our job to crush them.” But given that the industry has become hollowed out to the extent that there is little middle ground left for bands such as FWF to occupy, how will he know when Serfs Up! has done all it can do?
Nathan considers this for a while before concluding: “I just want to be able to afford to buy a dog with gold teeth.” And with that, Alex and Lias crack up, their laughter powered by nothing stronger than some lamb shish, a few cans of Coke and a bottle or two of beer.
Serfs Up! is out on Domino
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