FAT WHITE FAMILY

In 2011, in Peckham (in the London Borough of Southwark), Lias Kaci Saoudi, his brother Nathan and guitarist Saul Adamczewski founded the rock band Fat White Family, whose line-up has since undergone a few changes – with the Saoudi brothers still at the helm. In the spring of 2024, Fat White Family returns with their fourth album: the most sophisticated, vital and flamboyant creation of their career, that has, like everything they’ve done pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent, but of their health, their sanity, their very existence. To Lias Saoudi, Forgiveness Is Yours, “is about life as eternal contingency…about no longer suspecting, but knowing that this shit will never get any easier…in fact, it’s about to get a whole lot worse, your body’s going to go into decay and the people you love will slowly start dropping dead around you…but somehow, you’ve smashed enough of your expectations thus far in life, you’re sort of fine with it…you accept it”. Its eleven tracks come on like a sideways state of the nation tirade, a bulletin of indignities chronicling times spinning wildly out of joint yet 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 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. Right from their earliest days, Fat White Family have 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 carry the sacred flame. A band with the power to inspire, they are vehemently punk not in sound but in spirit, and their live shows are the stuff of urban legend — fervid whispers told of raw shamanic force, unbridled ferocity, shocking acts of transgression and self-abasement. You know what to expect!