Fat White Family have a new album, Forgiveness Is Yours, which launched at the beginning of the year. They have been on tour during 2024, including a massive set at Glastonbury, and dates throughout the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. As well as nights in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the band are also going to the Meredith Music Festival at the weekend, and next year amongst their solo dates, they’ll be supporting Primal Scream.Â
The night at the Oxford Arts Factory was tame compared to some of the high jinks that the band have become famous for, but even though there was plenty of shouting and swearing, and a bit of a fight with a fan, there was no denying the stage charisma of crowd- hungry frontman Lias Saoudi, nor the melodic and musical gems beneath the screams. Â Touch the Leather and Tinfoil Deathstar got the highly engaged crowd going,Â
RINSE opened for them, a brilliant short but sweet set, full of Naarm/Melbourne-via-Meanjin/Brisbane artist Joe Agius’ talent led tunes. He and RINSE have been previously described as a bit The Cure and a bit New Order. It’s not an inflated comparison and the band are getting more and more attention and great reviews for their synthy electro-poppy indie-rock vibes.Â
Fat White Family was famously formed in a squat in Peckham in 2011. Their journey has been a chronicled odyssey into hard drugs, mental illness, and altercations with the law, including being charged for indecent exposure at Splendour in the Grass 2016.
Saoudi co-wrote a book Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure, with the author Adelle Stripe a couple of years ago. It has been a bestseller and well received, full of front on honest accounts of the hedonism and Dionysian self destructive tendencies at the heart of the band’s creative process. At the end Stripe describes the Fat White Family as “a drug band with a rock problem.”
Saoudi is well- known as productive and poetic, littering the set with witty quips and political commentary. The lyrics of the bands songs are often a call to action or self reflection, and he has previously described the formation of the band as a reaction to a perception of apathy in the general population. The attention seeking overlies deeper meanings and messages, which need all the attention they can have thrown at them.
