The New Cue #377 April 29: Fat White Family's Lias Saoudi
“I was spangled on ketamine, imagining I was possessed by the spirit of John Lennon”
Good morning,
We hope you had a good weekend. In today’s edition we welcome back Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi to The New Cue. Lias has just put out the latest – and possibly last – Fat White Family album. We hope he’s over-estimating their demise because we like Fat White Family a lot. The world needs them. Anyway, we’ll let Lias fill you in on all the intrigue.
We’ll see you all again on Friday. In the meantime, enjoy the edition.
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi
On Friday, South London’s best-loved squat-rock degenerate combo Fat White Family released their fourth album, Forgiveness Is Yours. Much of it - Polygamy Is Only For The Chief, Bullet Of Destiny – found them slithering further along the electro rock chicanes of 2019’s career high point Serf’s Up. Yet at other times, as on The Archivist’s Ivor Cutler-like spoken word musings or the acid folk epic John Lennon in which Lias Saoudi imagines being possessed by the late Beatle, they’re carving out new territory. Here, have a listen…
One thing keen-eared listeners might notice, however, is the absence of the band’s co-founder and musical director Saul Adamczewski. As anyone who has followed the band over the years or read Lias’ hilarious but hair-raising memoir Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family And The Miracle Of Failure can attest, the core FWF relationship between Lias, Saul and Lias’ brother and keyboardist Nathan has been a volatile one to put it mildly. This time, however, the rupture between Lias and Saul appears to be one that isn’t going to be patched up anytime soon. The words “acrimoniously” and “permanently” were used in an accompanying press statement which sounds pretty serious. Chris called up Lias the other week to find out what’s been going on…
Hi Lias, how are you doing? Getting back into the swing of the promo trail?
Yeah. I’m doing it all on my own this time which has been a new thing. It’s been alright, I try to not repeat myself too often. You do find a kind of calcification of your own reading of the situation ends up occurring, so the origin of that thought becomes almost irrelevant. It becomes autonomous bullshit.
Not just doing interviews, but did you feel on this album that the onus of getting the band together, bringing the record to life and dragging it over the finish line all fell on you?
I think so. I mean, there’s been a complete breakdown in that kind of original triumvirate of me, Nathan and Saul. That’s just completely broken down now. It broke down a long time ago with Saul, we resuscitated it for a bit, and then it broke down again, and then we resuscitated again, and now it’s absolutely dead in the water. There’s no love lost there anymore.
And Nathan?
With Nathan, it’s been a process of monkey see, monkey do. Like, how do you be in a band? That’s how you’d be in a band. I’m the boss therefore I’m going to treat the people I work with like disposable underlings and throw my way around, which just was not on the agenda for me at all. With Saul, as much as I resented that behaviour, he was at least good at it. Nathan, on the other hand, is incredibly clumsy with it and that doesn’t really make any sense. It just got worse and worse and worse. The alienation thickens and we just didn’t we didn’t have any way of resolving conflict. People used to give Saul the nod because he was the one with the cool references and the melodic sensibility, but after he was out of the picture it got to a point where you were just in this infinite psychological headlock. It sucked all of the life and joy out of it. It felt like you were eating glass. It was not like a pleasant experience. There were periods where it would explode forward a little bit and there’d be excitement and then I don’t know what would happen but it would get swallowed up in the ego black hole.
I’m sure there were points on every album where you might have entertained the idea, but were there times making this where you seriously thought: Fuck it, I’m not doing this anymore, it’s just not worth it.
I just think you have to finish, though. You lose a member, you lose another member, you just have to finish. I think like that with projects generally. Sometimes I’ll write half an essay and it’ll sit on my computer for two years, but at some point or another you have to finish it. Otherwise what are you doing? You can’t just flounce out on your own elaborate psychodrama that you’ve concocted. This is what you fucking signed up for. This is what you wanted. ‘It got too much, this isn’t what I wanted...’ Well, maybe you should have done something else with your life, then? Who would have sympathy with that? We could have told you these guys were a little bit maxed out on the old jazz, these guys were maybe too funky for funk, you know? But here we are. It doesn’t make it any less egregious.
Was this the hardest album to finish, then?
I think because I’d grown apart from the others in a fundamental way and I started harbouring desires to do other things creatively I found it more difficult than the others. Every time I’m like, ‘You know what, we should probably do another one, because there’s just no fucking way it could be as difficult as the last one…’ That’s the trap I’m really looking out for now with this one. When I get that pang after we do a few good gigs and I that excitement backstage and everybody’s like, ‘Let’s do another album!’ That’s when the devil creeps in. No, it will be as difficult as the last one. It will be more difficult.
As anyone who’s read your book or been a fan of the band will know, you’ve had a lot of serious fallings out with Saul over the years. One thing that struck me reading your statement is that there was a finality to it. What changed this time?
The pandemic and just growing apart. I felt like during the pandemic I was able to reclaim some of my own self-respect. It was a certain pattern, after writing about it as well I realised that I was just locked in this embarrassing fucking cartoon and I rejected it. Psychologically, I just couldn’t deal with it anymore.
Saul didn’t want to record anything that had my vocal on it. I was there trying to make an album two years into this thing and he wants to make a record of instrumental drone tracks. Six months before that we were talking about making a spoken word record, the goalposts just kept changing. I couldn’t make sense of it. It was like: This guy just fucking resents me. That’s the way it felt. I just thought, ‘What’s the point here? It’s not going anywhere.’ We spent all of our budget and we’re getting nowhere. I couldn’t help but think that it was just wanton sabotage. I felt like that was a running theme throughout the whole arc of the band and then it would come back around again. The difference this time was the I was like, ‘No, I can’t just keep going round in that. I’d rather finish the album and fold the band than keep going round in that loop for the rest of my life.’ It doesn’t make any fucking sense, all your energy is spent playing these weird psychological games. It’s not really my problem at the end of the day.
Did being apart during the pandemic and reflecting on your life in the band in Ten Thousand Apologies underline that?
It was that period of having loads of time separate. I was having patches of being sober and clean for the first time, and then spending loads of time writing everything down and analysing my own life. It was like, ‘OK, this makes for an interesting read but it’s not a tenable way to live.’ The thing is, we’ve created such good stuff together before. The payoff was that you make these wonderful things. But that wasn’t happening, either. There was one song that we had, Saul had this really great melody for a song but he didn’t have the lyrics quite worked out so I spent two days writing lyrics for this melody, fitting the words so they fitted his melody exactly. I used to love working like that, it’s a real challenge as a writer, you have very specific syllable counts you have to work into. I showed him this thing and was like, ‘Shall we record it?’ And he was like, ‘No, no, we’ll get girls to sing it later..’
That was always the sweet spot that kept the whole thing going, despite all this animosity and weird bitterness, we had this beautiful thing that was beyond out our shitty temperaments. It got to the point where that was just gone. It’s a shame. I think if we had the whole team then it would have made a better Fat White Family record, but that option was just not on the table to be honest. So what you’ve got is what you’ve got.
When I spoke to you a couple of years ago you were talking about doing a solo acoustic album, did some of that find its way onto this record?
Yeah, that’s how Religion For One started, it was just an acoustic tune. Visions Of Pain, that started out as an acoustic thing. Basically, we each had a pile of songs. Saul wanted to make an avant-garde drone thing like [Lou Reed album] Metal Machine Music with a kind of like an imperial death folk twist, which sounds great, but once that fell through then it was just me and Nathan’s respective solo material mashed together. That’s basically what happened.
John Lennon, about you getting possessed by the spirit of John Lennon while being round Yoko Ono’s house is great. How much truth is in that one? You did meet Yoko through Sean Lennon didn’t you?
That is 100% based in fact. It was the day before an [FWF side-project] Insecure Men session. I was round Sean’s before the rest of the band got there. Me and Sean were hanging out having a bit of wine in one of the bedrooms in the house and Yoko walks in and starts complaining about having a bad back, so Sean set her down on the bed and starts giving her a massage. It was really tender. I was fucking spangled on K at this point. It was a time in my life when I was using a lot of ketamine. I’m thinking, ‘This is a fucking wonderful, wonderful spectacle. It was rough on the way up, it might be rough on the way down, but here you are, here’s your dividend, sir…’
She started chatting to me afterwards and the first thing she says is, ‘You remind me of my husband, he was a singer as well.’ I was like, ‘Oh really…’ But I was imagining that I was possessed by the spirit of John. But it was the bastard John, not the peace and love John, and he was fucked off about having been lingering around in the afterlife for 40 years. That’s basically just what happened. Sometimes you don’t have to pretend to be Harold Shipman or Joseph Goebbels, you can just play it as it lays.
Would you make another record like this or is that it for Fat White Family?
There’s gonna obviously be people that are like: Well, if Saul’s not there it’s not Fat White Family. Obviously people are entitled to that, it’s a valid point of view. But I don’t regret in any way going down the road and seeing. I’m trying to make the most of it. I think certain working relationships are probably completely defunct now. If I want to keep making albums, whether I call it The Fat White Family or The Fat White Stepfamily or whatever it is, that’s something I’ll be able to tell you in six months. It’s kind of like every time I’ve made an album. I’m like, ‘I’m never doing that again!’ But then when you have a reaction to it in real life when it’s not just you in a fucking bunker recording the thing.
I don’t know right now. I think the next thing I want to do is write another book. I’ve been toying with an idea going to Algeria for a long period. I want to take like a bunch of bands out there and tour and find some musicians out there and do a kind of jihadi Graceland. That’s the next thing I want to do. I don’t know whether that’s as Fat Whites or you give it some other fucking brand or whatever. That is a dirty word, but that’s basically what we’re talking about - what do you call it?
If this is it, what do you think Fat White Family’s legacy will be?
I think we were like a last gasp. There’s a general consensus in the culture now that scumbag indie rock is dead. And that’s probably a good thing. But I guess as a legacy, that maybe just for a moment there were these intolerable rogues that used to wander the Midlands going from shit venue to shit venue for 50 quid a pop, destroying their bodies with the pseudo hard left politics and bad speed for your entertainment and their own amusement. And remember those days because they’re gone forever. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I can’t work it out.
Do you think there aren’t any transgressive voices left in music anymore?
There doesn’t seem to be. I just think it’s dead. The idea of rock and roll as a vital cultural thing has just fucking gone. Maybe you have that in SoundCloud rap or something like that, but there’s no danger. It’s just a middle-class utility. It doesn’t have any of that danger. The ecosystem that produced those particular kinds of nefarious wares is no longer existent. It’s over. We were the vapours in the tank.
Can you imagine a band like Fat White Family existing today, let alone breaking through?
Nah, no chance. You’d kill them before they can grow. You’d be like: This shouldn’t be allowed to happen, for these people’s health and for the health of the collective. It’s a slightly less colourful world for that. There is a point in having that ritual space. Throughout culture that was how society responded to madness and stuff like that. Once upon a time, the mad men were considered sages and there was a safe space for transgression, a cordoned-off area where normal morality was at least partially suspended in order to give us a clearer picture of the whole body, a self-portrait of the communal civilisation. In this post, post post-modern liquid capital era that we currently find ourselves marooned in, that idea is anathema to that. It doesn’t fit in.
Can culture play that sort of role anymore?
No. It’s become a question of human beings becoming completely systematised. Everything is about productivity and efficiency. Anything that has a whiff of the transcendental or something that’s intangible that goes beyond the pure material is regarded as not just nonsensical, but usually dangerous and in need of crushing. There’s this delusional idea that everything is manageable if we just throw enough logic at it. There isn’t the confidence in the human spirit anymore.
It all sounds quite bleak.
The end game is kind of what they have in China already. I think we’re moving towards that, where it’s just the worst bits of capitalism and the worst bits of socialism mixed together in this kind of mega block. It’s an incredibly bleak landscape, culturally. And I think that’s our fate. I think that’s basically where we’re at. In fact, it’s kind of almost worse here because we’re incapable of calling a spade a spade. What difference does it make if you can vote between three of these people if it’s a complete sham? I’d rather it was just like, you know, Xi Jinping is the president so just fucking get on with it, because that’s basically what’s happening anyway. We can choose between these three things that are prescribed by the elite corporate overlords that control everything. I’d rather not have the illusion of free choice. The only power you have is to shop as best you can. That’s your job.
On that cheery note, what are you up to for the rest of the day?
I’ve got another interview to do and then I’m gonna go boxing. That’s the only thing that deals with the rage.
In a controlled environment, I hope, rather than just out on the streets of South London.
No, in a controlled environment.
Enjoy, thanks for talking to us Lias.
OK, thanks bye.
CC