When he was 12 Saoudi's parents divorced and his mother married a unionist from Cookstown, Co Tyrone What’s that then?’ I said, expecting some pearl of ethereal wisdom from on high, some nugget of total truth only available to those that reach the source. Covering not just the ten-year history of Fat White Family, but also singer Lias Saoudi’s family roots in Algeria and his life growing up in Northern Ireland with his younger brother Nathan, Ten Thousand Apologies is unapologetic. The book jumps from evocatively written third-person prose (alongside his bandmates, Saoudi’s parents both have POV chapters) to Saoudi’s bluntly hilarious recollections of the band’s numerous acts of depravity. We’ve lost the sense of the communal that pop used to express’ ... Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. Photograph: Stuart Mostyn/Redferns

In early 2014, the band launched a PledgeMusic campaign to fund their show at the South by Southwest festival, with a subsequent US tour. [6] Pledgers were given the self-released EP Crippled B-Sides and Inconsequential Rarities. Next was the single "I Am Mark E Smith" (referencing singer Mark E. Smith of the Fall), released 15 December 2014. [7] He was a surprisingly good sport about it. I think it was a difficult read for him because a lot of that stuff is dark and painful. He could have been the one person that could have just been, like: “No, I don’t want that out in the public sphere.” And he would have been well within his rights, but he was more like, “Nah, it should be nastier. It was much worse!” If he had a criticism, it was that it’s not dark enough. It’s also getting the full picture of a character. Yes. We’re going to go on tour and I’m playing. I’ve written loads of new songs, I’ve almost got an album’s worth of material. I was neglecting the creative side of myself. That’s the salvation.” We were in such a bad place,” reflects Saoudi. “We barely had any band left. Half of the group had really serious heroin problems.” Saoudi certainly wasn’t shy letting his hatred out when Margaret Thatcher passed away in 2013 and Fat White Family dangled a sheet with the words “The Bitch is Dead” from the Queen’s Head in Brixton, their unofficial HQ at the time (this, needless to say, before it reopened as a vegan gastropub). That was in bad taste and difficult to defend. However, it is understandable Saoudi might have a slightly different perspective on British politics compared to his peers.Of course, you need to be aware that the Lias sections of this book are his version of events, but his co-author Adelle Stripe has done exhaustive interviews with all the main players, including his brother Nathan and the band’s main songwriter Saul Adamczewski. That Stripe managed to make any sense of what can be at best often hazy recollections is testament to her skills as a writer. Here’s what went down at the after party of the Rolling Stone UK Awards in collaboration with Rémy Martin This self-devouring anger reached its apotheosis on their previous album, 2016’s Songs For Our Mothers. It was a glowering, disgruntled collection that seemed to actively wanted to be disliked (one song is called Lebensraum; another, Duce, revealed an obsession with Mussolini). Like a good documentary, a good music book will get you interested in an artist who you previously had no interest in. So it proves with Adelle Stripe's book about Fat White Family.

Your relationship with Saul is volatile at times. At one point, you shop for a taser – unable to find one, you settle on a pepper spray – to defend yourself against him during band arguments… I had the distinct feeling that my life was hurtling towards some kind of crescendo. Ten years had gone past since getting involved with music. For the most part those years had fallen on top of Lias (to me): “He’s edging towards the Brian Wilson-recluse stereotype. He just wants to be in a wooden box with a microphone.” We were excitedly filling him in when some kind of heinous commotion could be heard unfolding in the adjacent tent, Mark E. Smith’s tent. He was being told in no uncertain terms by hisAre Fat White Family “an invitation, sent by misery, to dance to the beat of human hatred”? Are they leading us on a journey “from the blinding white heat of a midday Mediterranean shore to the embattled boudoir of Ike and Tina Turner, from the clotted grey of Dr Harold Shipman’s waiting room to the final hour of the Third Reich in the Berlin bunker”? God, I do hope so. He feels grateful the Fat Whites got together when they did; he thinks just a few years later the band wouldn’t have happened, because there would have been nowhere for them to rehearse, put on gigs or crash out afterwards. London is closing its doors. “I work literally all the time now,” he says. “Every day I’m on the phone or in the studio or on the road, and I still can’t break even. It feels like every year they move the goal posts. At what point am I going to be able to rent a flat and have a record player, so I can listen to other people’s music for a bit?”

What rating out of 10 did NME award your bandmate Saul Adamczewski’s pre-Fat White Family group The Metros’ 2008 debut album ‘More Money Less Grief’?Lias: “You turned it into something that I never could, but I had a skeleton of a song, and then you turned it into something much more interesting.” The excess disguises the true heart of Ten Thousand Apologies, which is a sort of yearning: a search for enlightenment, a way to live, but especially for a home. The Saoudis feel the disconnect of the offspring of an immigrant parent; Adamczewski is unsettled, in all senses. They are restless, without respite. Like a tragicomic penny dreadful dreamed up by a mutant hybrid of Jean Genet, the Dadaists and Mark E. Smith, the Fat Whites' story is a frequently jaw-dropping epic of creative insurrection, narcotic excess, mental illness, wanderlust, self-sabotage, fractured masculinity, and the ruthless pursuit of absolute art. Yoko Ono, Randy [Jones] from the Village People….is [The Human League’s] Phil Oakey on there? Oh, and Rebecca Taylor, aka Self Esteem. Quite the cast!”

Saul looks at Lias a lot. I can’t tell if he’s goading him, or wanting him to join in, or do something differently. Lias looks at the table, but his voice is louder than Saul’s, his sentences longer. At one point, they call the band a marriage and say that they don’t mind getting divorced. I start to feel less like a ref, and more like a gooseberry. It all makes for an entertaining read, but you had to live it. Having to sit down and remember some of that stuff must have been difficult? What’s interesting to me is that despite their differences, both bands consider themselves to be of the left. Fat White Family’s 2019 album Serfs Up! ruminates on the middle-class trappings sold to us by the ideology of social mobility. Tastes Good With the Money is particularly resonant for its wit and catchiness, and features an incisive interlude from guest vocalist Baxter Dury: “Gotta fathom your own legacy / Slimming shakes / Bathing on the right side of surprises / And a big mushroom cloud/ For the middle classes / Leaves a beautiful shape / For you to project your fears on to.” Show me a funnier and more withering summation of the red scare and status anxiety that defines today’s centrist factions. Huge amounts. I’d have to wait until most of the people involved are dead before everybody gets the redux version because it would completely ruin everybody’s lives. This is the rated PG version. Cecilia, Woody (25 January 2017). "Saul Adamczewski from Fat White Family played his first gig with his new 10-piece band last night - Loud And Quiet". Loud And Quiet . Retrieved 28 January 2017.stood up, began pacing, wiping the wine out of his eyes. He kept saying: ‘That wasn’t right, Mark. You shouldn’t have done that, Mark, as he marched up and down in a barely contained rage. Bromwich, Kathryn (18 March 2017). "On my radar: Lias Saoudi's cultural highlights". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 May 2021. This was a period in my life when people that I’d previously only ever seen on the telly were suddenly swaggering into my reality on a semi-regular basis. Amidst the multitude marching through I began formulating designs on her instantly. This man may be hugely wealthy and successful, but just wait until she catches a glimpse of my kebab-wheel torso turning in the fresh morning light!