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"Mingled smoke and fog drift over the blackened scene of a brutal battle. Amidst the carnage, the billowing craters, and the groans of the wounded, a group of silhouetted figures stagger forth: men who are bloodied and maimed yet still defiant, still just about devoted to a long-lost cause as they roam ever onwards, through visions of pain to the end of the night…
Fat White Family are back. The cult south-London band’s long-gestated fourth album, Forgiveness Is Yours, has, like everything they’ve done but more so, pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent, but of their health, their sanity, and their very existence. The external enemies have melted away — perhaps they were hallucinations all along. The Fat Whites’ dirty war was only ever with themselves — a war for hearts and minds, their own as much as anyone’s. A war whose primary objective, it turns out, was survival.
Who would have predicted, when Fat White Family first hurled themselves at the music scene in a nihilistic art jihad a decade ago, that, in 2024, the band would not only still be here, but putting out the most sophisticated, vital and flamboyant music of their career? Right from their earliest days, Fat White Family — fronted by singer Lias Saoudi, with the since-departed Saul Adamczewski behind him — instinctively grasped the long neglected power of myth in rock’n’roll, the necessity of giving people something (or nothing) to believe in. In a drab monoculture of play-it-safe pop careerists, Fat White Family carried the sacred flame. A band with the power to inspire, they were vehemently punk not in sound but in spirit, and their live shows were the stuff of urban legend — fervid whispers told of raw shamanic force, unbridled ferocity, shocking acts of transgression and self-abasement.
Released in 2013, the band’s ragbag debut album, Champagne Holocaust, contained flashes of brilliance amidst riotous discord and lo-fi sonics. Their confrontational follow-up, 2016’s Songs For Our Mothers, was a wilful exercise in listener-repellence that threw up such fan favourites as ‘Whitest Boy on the Beach’, ‘Tinfoil Deathstar’, and ‘Hits Hits Hits’. Non-album single releases like the madly infectious ‘Touch the Leather’, and the cartoon-industrial bravura of ‘I Am Mark E. Smith’, attracted ever more believers to the band’s quixotic cause.
Released in 2019, third album Serfs Up! marked the moment when Fat White Family truly and spectacularly came into their own. A radical evolution in sound and sensibility, it was peppered with such bulletproof instant classics as ‘Feet’, ‘Rock Fishes’, ‘Oh Sebastian’ and ‘Tastes Good with the Money’. Four years on, Serfs Up! still sounds like what it did at the time: a canonical behemoth. Fat White Family were no longer just a myth — they were taking their place among the greats.
To Lias Saoudi, the Fat Whites’ resplendent new record, Forgiveness Is Yours, ‘is about what happens when you run out of road’ — the music you make when you’re at the end of the line, your tether, the world. Its eleven tracks come on like a sideways state of the nation tirade, a bulletin of indignities chronicling times spinning wildly out of joint. Consider the Nathan Saoudi-penned synthwave track ‘Work’, whose wild-eyed narrator is a desperate man in a failed state:
The lights are low, the meter’s run dry, your mother’s with another man And when they tell you to go softly, check this knife that’s in my hand
Elsewhere, Lias spits out his no-less desperate stratagems for endurance amidst perpetual crisis:
If you leave hell behind, build it elsewhere instead
If you want to escape from horror, bury yourself therein
During the tumultuous period it’s taken for the new album to arrive, the band has remained active on multiple fronts. Side projects and solo projects abound, while Lias made the surprise lockdown move of refashioning himself as one of the more entertaining, recklessly candid prose writers around, first with his column for The Social, ‘Beyond the Neutral Zone’, and then by collaborating with author Adelle Stripe on one of the great rock’n’roll books of this or any other decade, Ten-Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure.
Nonetheless, the new album’s creation has left serious psychic scarring. ‘My only ambition for its release’, says Lias, ‘is that I earn enough money from touring it to pay for the years of high-end psychotherapy I’ll need in order to move on.’ Happily, for all its creators’ sufferings (founding member Saul Adamczewski permanently and acrimoniously left the band during its recording), Forgiveness Is Yours is an embarrassment of delights. It begins with one of two spoken-word soundscapes in which Lias’s literary interests move to the fore: the gorgeously scene-setting opium-hit of ‘The Archivist’, in which Lias intones, T.S. Eliot-like, about coming undone and being at one with his failures. ‘John Lennon’ is a louche, slinky, Gainsbourgian number that showcases the band’s high musical savvy alongside one of Lias’s most ambitious lyrics: a compressed short story in which the singer, meeting Yoko Ono while blazed on ketamine, is possessed mid-song by the spirit of the departed Beatle. ‘Bullet of Dignity’ is three minutes of ecstatic release, a Maghrebian desert-storming rave-up that will surely become key to the the band’s live sets. ‘Polygamy Is Only for the Chief’ is pure Fat Whites, a glam-industrial pounder with an irresistibly horny vocal like a K-holing Prince. Adam Harmer’s gnarly, intrusive guitars coil around his deadpan backing vocals as the song lurches nauseously between registers, undefinably unique (to Lias, it’s a song about ‘yearning for a time when we could be who we actually are: wankers’). ‘Religion For One’ is something new and magical for Fat Whites — a miniature symphony in solipsism, spotlighting the album’s recurrent themes of interpersonal rancour, narcissistic isolation, petty betrayal, and burning hatred. Not that it’s all odium and bitterness. Fat White Family can do pop when they want to: ‘What’s That You Said To Me’ is an infectious, sleazy joy — Jarvis Cocker at the Italo-disco — while ‘Visions of Pain’ is an addled litany of nightmares over a cheery bossa nova shuffle.
We can only take Lias Saoudi at his word when he says, ‘The overarching aesthetic themes at work here are torpor and further torpor still.’ Forgiveness Is Yours is a testament to the will to create even when catastrophes keep happening, when you’ve come out of the drug-fog long enough to realise that the damage is irreparable, all truces are fleeting, and the game was never worth the candle. The revolution has turned on itself; the movement is devouring its offspring; the drugs definitively did not work. Everything is broken, everything is brilliant. Burned clear, blasted free of illusions, Forgiveness Is Yours is a quintessence of disenchantment and the bittersweet fruit of vicious, sinister times. Let’s enjoy it while we can — there’s nothing like it around"
