In the Fat White Family way: Drugs, illness, nudity and pizza... life in rock's most dangerous band

Outrageous, provocative and deliciously chaotic, Fat White Family are the antidote to the legions of bland sound-alike bands dominating the charts.

And at the heart of the beast is frontman Lias Saoudi.

“We just do what we are interested in,” he growls. “Everyone else is turgid and boring.”

He admits he hasn’t been very well – but is now feeling better.

“I was sick for a year,” he groans, nurturing what sounds like the mother of all hangovers.

“I wasn’t looking after myself, and was exhausted. We were living in a pub, the Queens Head in Brixton, for a few years which wasn’t very good for anyone’s health.

“I had pneumonia and was coughing up blood at one point. I thought I was done for.

“It was a result of snorting and drinking every day and living at the Queens, but then instead of recuperating, going out on a really long tour and ending up in a really bad way.”

He goes on: “Just going at it 20 times a month takes its toll. Now I want to draw a line under it.”

It must have been fun though? “Fun is one word for it,” he says dryly. “But it was pretty brutal.”

Of course it wasn’t just the drink. There was also the drugs, which decimated the band.

“I’m not going to deny it’s nice, but it doesn’t help you in any way,” he says. “You end up losing your mind.”

And then there was the pizza!

“Pizza, yeah,” he says. “We ran a pizza kitchen above the pub, but we didn’t have a lot of trade. The best was the pepperoni, but the problem was that our pizzas weren’t better than the others, which is why no one bought them. And our ingredients were terrible.”

And, he admits, hygiene may also have been an issue.

“We were quite good at papering over the cracks, but we did once find a dead rat under the fridge,” he says with pride.

“Perhaps we should have got a cat?”

Thankfully the punk-country band proved more successful at making music than catering.

Having met in a Peckham squat, they honed their craft in Brixton, forging a reputation for caring little for what people thought – and a compulsion to offend.

Take their second album, this year’s Songs For Our Mothers, which revels in song titles like Love Is The Crack, Goodbye Goebels, Leibensraum and When Shipman Decides.

It’s inflammatory stuff.

“These are things we are interested in,” he says, in defence. “And it’s related to everything else.

“You could say we court controversy, but we are socialists like any human being.”

Even the band’s name is intended to provoke – with its echoes of American cult leader Charles Manson and his murderous ‘family’.

Lias cites a rather different influence though. “It comes from David Bowie,” he says.

“He was the Thin White Duke, but we like the idea of the Fat White Duke. I’m not a massive David Bowie fan though.”

Heresy, indeed. But that’s what we expect – along with the fighting, onstage nudity and nasty lyrics.

“We are not deliberately dark,” Lias insists. “But it is difficult to swallow.

“We do provoke with imagery, but only because everyone else is devoid of that – which is embarrassing and tepid.

“But we are light-hearted, affable and fun-loving,” he jokes. “Like Hanson, or Scooter… or the Venga Boys!”

Their sense of nihilism extends to the band itself, which began to implode after the release of debut Champagne Holocaust – a victim of their drink and drug-fuelled rock & roll lifestyle.

It ultimately fell apart in America during recording for Songs For Our Mothers, in the unlikely setting of Yoko Ono’s Woodstock mansion and studio, where Sean Lennon was producing the new material.

“Things got messy,” admits Lias.

Recording halted, they stopped working with Lennon, and took time out to sort out their issues.

• Courting controversy: The Fat White Family have been to the brink and lived to tell the tale

It only came together last year, back in London, under the production of guitarist, and recovering heroin addict, Saul Adamczewski, who had previously been thrown out of the band, but is now solidly back in.

And, says Lias, things are looking better.

“We’ve got new songs and new members,” he says. “With a new bassist and drummer.”

“I’ve whittled down the band and got rid of the jerks.

“You could say there’s a bit of friction,” he goes on. “There’s the usual stuff about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, and behaving like a bunch of drunk retards the whole time.”

He almost laughs: “I guess I am a bit of a masochist.

“There are only so many times you can have a tambourine thrown at your head before you start imagining you’re in the bunker with Hitler or that you’re Tina Turner.”

And he has no intention of letting the band slide back into the abyss of heroin abuse. One of the darkest songs on the album is Tinfoil Deathstar, which addresses the drug’s deadly impact.

“A few years ago no-one was on it but then this brown cloud rolled through London,” says Lias. “The three nights a week on cocaine? No one can afford that any more. At the end of the song the ghost of David Clapson is standing at the window asking to be let into the party. He was a former soldier, a veteran, who had his benefits cut after he missed one appointment and they found him dead in his apartment.

“He had diabetes and couldn’t afford to keep his fridge on and keep his insulin cool, which was the thing that killed him. He was found next to a stack of CVs. It’s disgusting. He had £3.44 to his name and the autopsy showed he had no food in his stomach when he died. He had worked his whole life and only started claiming dole so he could look after his mum.”

On Sunday the band come to Oxford, for a show at the O2 Academy. He admits to being a fan of the city. “It’s a great city,” he says. “I was there for a week when I was 18. I was going to go to art school there, at the Ruskin, but that’s all I remember now.

“Still, I’m looking forward to having a pint of real ale, if I make it that far!”

Where and when
Fat White Family play the O2 Academy Oxford on Sunday.
Tickets £13.50 including fees, from ticketweb.co.uk