The (musical) forecast is bleak, but Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi is still in the game

The last time Lias Saoudi’s band Fat White Family played Australia, they were escorted from Splendour in the Grass by the police (merely a misunderstanding, Saoudi has said), then tracked down to their hotel by someone who wanted to fight them. These are unmemorable events in the grand scheme of things because, months later, Saoudi would check his Facebook inbox to find a series of messages from Byron Bay Local Court, informing him that NSW Police were charging him with obscene exposure.

On stage, Saoudi had stuck not one but two fingers up his bum – nothing unusual for the former art school student who’d long held a fascination with Egon Schiele. “I wanted to make a stage version of Schiele,” Saoudi says amiably, sitting at home in London in a dressing gown. “That contorted, autoerotic, claustrophobic thing. Pervert music.”

This incident, in 2016, was a year before Australian musician Kirin J Callinan was charged by NSW Police for lifting his kilt and flashing photographers at the ARIA Awards. Just as Callinan was issued a good behaviour bond by calling on Jimmy Barnes, Neil Finn and director Jane Campion as referees, so Saoudi found some sympathetic backers to protest that art equals mischief.

“There was Phyllida Barlow, may she rest in peace,” says Saoudi of the late dame. “She worked at Slade [School of Fine Art] when I was there and said, ‘If you ever need help with anything, give us a shout.’ She wrote a really beautiful essay about nudity and art that went all the way back to antiquity. And then it was Sean Lennon and Rosanna Arquette. I was dating her daughter at the time, and she chipped in.”

British band Fat White Family.Credit: Louise Mason

Saoudi’s Australian lawyers built the double-pronged defence that a) it was common knowledge that the singer regularly performed naked, and b) the stage was a space for performance art. What he’d done was a form of live sculpture. The charges were dropped, and the band will be back in December for new dates and the Meredith Music Festival.

Fat White Family are not a household name in Australia, but in Britain, it’s a different story. There, the perpetually malnourished South London band have been covered in every major paper, inspiring some of the best journalism I’ve seen in years. Four albums in, they’ve forensically explored and lived the themes of class and racism.

To give the provocative band name some context, Lias and his brother Nathan (who may or may not still be keyboard player as the band is prone to storm-outs) were born to a Yorkshire mother and Algerian father, and were frequently referred to as “sand n---ers” in the Northern Ireland town they moved to. Spite was quite the creative force in the band’s early days, though Saoudi cautions that it’s not sustainable.

Saoudi performing with Fat White Family at this year’s Glastonbury Festival.Credit: Redferns

“You can end up being a caricature of yourself because you don’t really have the same reservoir of spite and alienation to draw on once you’ve been accepted or lauded,” he says, “so then it all gets cartoonish. Mix that with some unaddressed mental health issues and drug problems, and it all gets sour and embarrassing.”

In 2014, the band really went nuclear. Fat White Family walked away from a bidding war to start their own label. Forever broke and frequently homeless, they raised funds to go to Austin music conference SXSW by auctioning their services: a primal scream workshop, a “special” massage, a tattoo from the drummer. Once on US soil, Saoudi had his penis Vaselined and duly immortalised by veteran groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, and married a stunning American DJ after a brief courtship (the union was even briefer). The band appeared on Late Show with David Letterman and found a benefactor in Sean Lennon, whose home and studio were put to good use. On their next trip Stateside, Lady Gaga, interest piqued, hung out with them in New York, posting backstage photos to Instagram.

TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO ESME LIAS SAOUDI

1. Worst habit? Indecision.
2. Greatest fear? Having to do something I really despise for a living.
3. The line that stayed with you? There’s a lyric by The Fall [in Blindness] about how 99 per cent of all non-smokers will die. I like that because it implies there’s some mythical, immortal 1 per cent.
4. Biggest regret? I f---ed about a bit much at art school. I probably wouldn’t have ended up in a band with a bunch of scumbags.
5. Favourite book? It’s Me, Eddie, by Eduard Limonov.
6. The artwork or song that you wish was yours? Fog on the Tyne by Paul Gascoigne [released in peak 1990 “Gazzamania” surrounding the UK soccer hero], a perfect cultural moment. Empires were built, empires will fall.
7. If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I’ve become a bit obsessed with revolutionary France recently, but I’d want to avoid Robespierre and the terror. So maybe just after the Reign of Terror.

And yet, they’re a band that became famous despite themselves. They’d followed the Libertines’ trail of crack crumbs out of London squats. And, similarly to the Libertines, band friction was so passionate that it almost became a performance art of its own. “I saw it that way initially – that it makes for interesting copy and that you can turn disadvantages into advantages with art or music,” Saoudi says, “but you get to a certain point, and it’s just a pain in the arse.”

All this has been thrillingly detailed in a book, Ten Thousand Apologies, that Saoudi co-wrote with journalist Adelle Stripe, which became a Sunday Times bestseller. (Curiously, no matter how much Fat White Family try to repulse, the establishment keeps lapping them up.) The book is stuffed with unhygienic tales of spirited degradation and grimy brotherhood. Reading it, you’d wonder how they could ever enter another country again. “I’ve been to America since, and it was OK,” Saoudi shrugs. “I guess it’s an ecstatic truth that gets us off the hook. There’s plausible deniability there, or something.”

Their fourth album, Forgiveness Is Yours, is as uncharacterisable as its predecessors. Today You Become Man joins that rarest of canons: songs about circumcision. The prowling monologue is from the POV of Saoudi’s older brother, Tam, who’d had the procedure done as a five-year-old, without anaesthetic, in mid-’80s Algeria. Another single, Work, throbs with nervy energy and is born of Saoudi’s fear of ever having to go job hunting again. “I’ve managed to avoid getting a ‘normal job’ for over a decade,” he says. “I consider that the core victory at the heart of all of this.”

When Saoudi was asked by an ex, now working in casting, if he’d appear in a 2020 Hyundai commercial, he did so, then flat out denied it was him. (As some wag on YouTube commented: “Eh? He has a driving licence?”) In the ad, Saoudi is a design genius, feverishly dashing out sketches of cars – but make no mistake, in real life, amid the chaos, Saoudi does have a voracious work ethic. He also provides the voiceover in his distinctive deep timbre: equal parts Scottish, Northern Irish and Northern English.

“I’ve been waiting for the phone to ring since that came out, and it hasn’t,” he says when asked if Gucci and co. have been calling. But is he at least feeling some job security now? “The current climate is a slowly unfolding apocalypse where band culture is concerned,” he says. “You’ve got the twin pincers of social media and Spotify crushing everything good and rich and plausible about music. Spotify managed to make it so nobody would be able to do this full-time unless they’re really privileged. Who wants music that’s derived only from that demographic?”

You may have picked up on a pessimistic streak. In an article Saoudi wrote for UnHerd, he considered writing as a possible exit strategy from the music industry, and on the day we speak he’s working on a new book proposal. Then again, he’s also moonlighting in several bands. “I’m still in the game, but the forecast is bleak. We live in the shadow of this golden era, and it’s not something you’ll ever recreate in a post-digital future,” he says.

“Those great titans, whether it’s Leonard Cohen or the Fall, get taller and taller as we move away from them. It’s crippling to live in the shadow of that epoch.”

Fat White Family play The Croxton, Melbourne, December 2; Oxford Arts Factory, Sydney, December 3; The Brightside, Brisbane, December 4 and Meredith Music Festival, December 6.