FAT WHITE FAMILY
Tramshed, Cardiff
Wed 27 Nov
Fat White Family’s third and most accomplished record, Serfs Up!, signals a new dawn for a band that was once in tatters, blighted by substance abuse and internal divisions. Now, the drugs are gone and relations are good. A more equal distribution of creative duties led them to its eclectic sound, according to their animalistic frontman Lias Saoudi.
“Our guitarist-in-chief and main co-conspirator Saul [Adamcewski] was out of the picture when we started the record. So it was me and Nathan [Saoudi] struggling to come up with ideas. Also the addition of Alex White was a big one — a really highly-skilled instrumentalist. For once [Saul] was working around our ideas as opposed to the other way around.”
Saoudi recalls gorging on a broad range of music during the making of the album, from having the Wham! B-side Blue (Armed With Love) on repeat, to obscure Brazilian folk. “We were also listening to Yeezus by Kanye West a lot at the time, strangely enough… This sordid, hyper-narcissistic content I found to be more interesting than this flag-waving, faux-left, political nonsense that most of these so-called exciting, up-and-coming guitar bands have been putting out these days.” Lyrically, the frontman cites French misanthropes Jean Genet and Louis-Ferdinand Céline as key influences.
Their tour begins a week before their debut Cardiff show – but are those days of drug-fuelled debauchery behind them? “I’ve really noticed the difference of being just a little bit older… I’m at the point now where I have to do exercise,” he tells me, heating up a bowl of his Algerian stepmother’s nourishing fish soup. “I’ve reached that point where the game’s up. You can’t just sort of carry on like that forever.”
Saoudi is at his father’s Muslim household, an “ideal” environment for winding down “after being on the road with the Fats.” “The hour I get to spend on stage is my favourite bit of time. It’s the ultimate catharsis – that experience is the only thing that allows me to put up with the utterly schizophrenic nature of the rest of it.”
words SAM PRYCE
Tickets: £18.50. Info: 029 2023 5555 / www.tramshedcardiff.com