Lias Saoudi Is Just Relieved Fat White Family Didn't Go Up In 'A Puff Of Brown Smoke'

Sat in the canteen of a hotel in Lisbon, and feeling like “Julia Roberts in Notting Hill”, Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi says that it’s all a bit new. He’s currently on a press tour for the band’s new album, and major label debut, Serfs Up!. It’s hardly his first time around the block, but he’s “never done a record like this” before either. “Where everything's regimented. Everything's planned.”

During our chat, Saoudi shares that Fat White Family once joked that the path to success was “to ritualistically lower people's expectations”. "Instead of improving, what you had to do was just lower everybody else’s expectations." For a long time, expectations were about six feet under. After years of illness, addiction, infighting and controversy, the smart money was never on the Fat Whites surviving themselves, let alone coming out the other end having evolved.

“I think we did a pretty good job of fucking our lives up with drugs and bullshit behaviour," says Saoudi. "And I think it was kind of, like, ‘Well, what was the last ten years about, if this is just gonna sort of end in a dreadful hangover?’

“For want of other, more meaningful relationships in my life, this is about the only thing I’ve really got that matters. For me personally, I can't speak for the other guys in the group. But, depressing as that might sound, this is about the be-all and end-all for me, for at least the last five years, anyway. So to see it not go up in a puff of brown smoke was some relief to me. A massive, massive relief for me.”

It was a close thing. Towards the end of the album cycle for Songs For Our Mothers two years ago, the Fat White beast was junk sick and tearing itself to pieces. The band splintered, and the main instrumental force behind Fat Whites, guitarist Saul Adamczewski, was given his marching orders, fired from a band widely perceived as malevolent “junkie fuck-ups” for the severity of his temperament and addiction. 

With things falling apart, Saoudi took his younger brother, keys player Nathan Saoudi, north of London to Sheffield to escape the city’s “distractions and temptation”. They made themselves a “smack fortress” – “beyond this line you do not tread if you've got little pinprick eyes” – and got to work. 

By the time the scraps of Fat White Family started demoing Serfs Up!, they had signed to Domino and Nathan had stepped into the vacuum left by Adamczewski. Then Adamczewski returned, having kicked his habit in rehab, the relationship "far more professional and far more reasonable". The dynamic had shifted. Fat White Family had grown up.

“We were communicating with each other again, because chemically we were roughly on the same page as each other. So me and Saul weren’t – we didn't have one bust-up doing [Serfs Up!]. Last album was just one big bust up, the whole fucking thing. But, on top of that, my little brother Nathan, he started writing key songs. And really developing a sense of melody. So, when we sacked Saul off, everybody else kind of had to up their game. And then Saul came back anyway, and had loads of material. So it was kind of the best of all possible worlds, in a way.”

As Saoudi says, “You got to survive your own tepid legacy after a while.

“You just change as you get older, man, you just change. It's like, you can't be in the fucking Birthday Party forever, do you know what I mean? Unless you want to die.

“But I mean, the same anger isn’t there. There is anger there, and there’s frustration and it's all — it's still there. But it's not the same, you know? You've learned to channel it a little bit. 

So Fat White Family have returned – reunited, tempered and clean. “That’s a big word, ‘clean’." protests Saoudi. "I wouldn't go that far." He does use the words “competent” and “ambitious” though. And Serfs Up! is ambitious, running through everything from twisted, Marc Bolan glam to digital tropicana. Lead single Feet is an obvious people mover – albeit slightly discomforting sonically – balancing repetitive 808s and industrial percussion with lush strings and a mesmerising bass choir. It still seethes with contempt. Fat White Family haven’t stopped casting stones. But for the first time there’s hope as well, and pop polish, Saoudi citing Wham and UB40 as influences. 

“I mean, part of us kinda wanted to aggravate the fanbase by making a record like this in the first place,” says Saoudi. “It was like, ‘Well, how do we upset people now? We've done, like, heroin dirge, and songs about pedophilia, and bombing theme parks, and love letters to Hitler and all that kind of stuff. Where do we go now? What's dangerous now?' And we kind of thought about it for a minute, and it was like, ‘Well, white reggae?’

“Sometimes white reggae is the edge, it turns out,” laughs Saoudi. “Sometimes that's the danger.

“So the original impulse was a little bit like, ‘Come on, let's make a fucking, let's try to make a pop album. Then everybody will hate us," Saoudi laughs again. "But I think we've made a good attempt at it."