Lias Saoudi of Fat White Family: 'I was too scared to get up on stage without speed, beers and mushrooms'

In the cancel-culture age of wokery and general mimsiness, a rock band might struggle if they were to announce themselves as Anthrax or Slayer or The Strangers or The Killers. And maybe Fat White Family would have problems, too.

Fat? You can’t say it anymore. White? That doesn’t sound terribly inclusive. And isn’t family an outmoded, bourgeois concept? Lias Saoudi laughs, but admits the moniker has come to the attention of the Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells. “I write for [political website] UnHerd where there have been some Tories sniffing around. You know: ‘Who the hell are Fat White Family and what are they doing in my town?’ Is the name racist? I’m like: ‘Look, man, half my family are white and they’re all overweight. It’s merely observational!’”

Saoudi is the half-Algerian, half-Brit, totally rock ’n’ roll frontman. He’s not essaying on politics today but spilling wild stories about growing up in Scotland, sailing the seas with Old Firm fans, charming Yoko Ono and his brother’s circumcision.

Lias Saoudi (with dog) and Fat White Family

Although did I say totally rock ’n’ roll? Fat White Family have always given good quote. “Every one of us has had a hard drugs or drink problem” was the most eye-catching headline from 2019 and the release of the Serfs Up! album when the debauched, class-war outragers went disco – with flute solos. For the almost-as-fabulous follow-up Forgiveness Is Yours, Saoudi has already offered: “I went on a night out that lasted 17 years.” But via Zoom from Nijmejen in Holland he tells me how this may be as close as his band will ever get to being the Fat White Temperance Society and admits: “For the first time ever I’ve been on the road sober.”

Just a few weeks previously, Saoudi, 38, had wondered if he might have to quit gigging. “I’d been on an acoustic tour before coming out with the band and suffered a bit of a mental breakdown. It had been the usual scenario: booze, coke, Valium. I knew I couldn’t get f****d like that again and so came to the conclusion: either I do [shows] straight or stop them altogether.”

Cleaning up the act wasn’t going to be easy if a previous attempt five years ago was any guide. “I’d managed to do one gig, in Leeds, without having a drink but the next night in Edinburgh fell off the wagon in quite a serious way. My friend gave me some mushroom seeds – innocuous-looking things and because they were so small I ate loads. At first the buzz was great but then I started seeing demons in the crowd and had to come off stage. I was being sick in a bucket while listening through the wall to the band carry on playing Goodbye Goebbels. It was horrible.

“But, so far anyway, I’m enjoying the latest tour. It’s amazing how much more limber you are when you’ve not had six pints, four shots of tequila, mushrooms, Valium, coke from the previous night and all that s*** … you know?

Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi

“I think I’d convinced myself for years that, if I wanted, I could just stop all that. In reality I was too scared to get up on stage without at least a couple of shots of speed, a few beers and some mushrooms if they were going.

“I’d end up in this weird f****n’ psychological malaise and that was an everyday state. But do you know where I was yesterday? The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam gazing up at all these Rembrandts and Vermeers. That felt weird, too, and honestly not dissimilar to being on drugs.

“And regarding live performance, I reckon if you do enough drugs on stage and then just stop, it’s the most like-being-on-drugs experience you can have. Suddenly the crowd are in high definition. It’s like watching a movie in HD – almost too real. You notice tiny details. That person yawning. Those two right up the back looking like they might be having a shag. You’re aware of everything.”

Saoudi was born in Southampton, moved to Galway and then when he was seven his computer-programmer father Bashir got a job in Ayr. “I was there for five years, played football, formed a Warhammer club with some other sad little bastards and generally liked it fine. Then in first year at Kyle Academy my parents split up and I went to live with my mum in Northern Ireland. That was Cookstown, bandit country, f****n’ terrible, and I missed Scotland, which suddenly seemed cosmopolitan in comparison, while Ayr was milk and honey.

“I mean, the town was sometimes quite feisty. The school bully was a girl. My best friend was an Indian lad, David Molliconie, and one day this butch lass called him a ‘Paki’. I tried to play the big man and she booted me in the bollocks. A few days later, approaching Christmas, one of them had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and I had to spend the whole holiday in hospital. That giant knacker signified the end of my anti-racism crusade.”

Bashir remained in Ayr and Saoudi and younger brother Nathan would regularly go back to visit him for “ten-pin bowling and sad curries”. Fat White Family songs can explore some pretty dark themes and who knows how much riding the SeaCat with steaming, spewing Celtic and Rangers fans contributed to Saoudi’s worldview.

Fat White Family have been dubbed “the drugs band with a rock problem” and Saoudi talks of “a Rubik’s Cube of feuding components”. Nathan has been a member until recently but after a fall-out is having what Saoudi calls a “psychedelic sabbatical”. There’s hope for rapprochement at some point but that seems less likely between Saoudi and Saul Adamscewski, either in or out and currently the latter. The pair have written well together but suffer from “mutually disjunctive destructiveness … a shitty yin-and-yang”.

The new album draws on family memory but unsurprisingly Today You Become Man is no wistful childhood lament, rather the story of how Saoudi’s older brother Tamlan was driven through their father’s Algerian mountain town aged five, thinking he was going book shopping only to be laid out on a table surrounded by men in a crumbling shack and told to bite on a piece of wood for the ceremony of circumcision. To speak-sing the track, Saoudi copied the pulsing delivery of David Keenan, the Scottish author of This Is Memorial Device.

Meanwhile, the track John Lennon dates from happier times in the company of Adamscewski. “We were in a studio in upstate New York when Yoko Ono turned up. She had a bad back so Saul gave her a massage. Then she told me I reminded her of John, which was nice, considering at the time I was smashed on Ketamine.”

The future of Fat White Family is uncertain but twas ever thus. Our chat finishes with a return to politics. Saoudi has been underwhelmed by the election campaign apart from in one respect. “Rishi Sunak has been slagged off for wanting to bring back National Service but I find the idea quite endearing. It would have straightened out a few of the guys who’ve come and gone from this band.”

Forgiveness Is Yours is out now on Domino