The White Family Are at It Again
Fat White Family are the seediest, strangest, nastiest guitar group in Britain today, and The Quietus loves them. Nosotros sent John Calvert to review a recent gig in a derelict infirmary. Photographs thanks to Lou Smith
Not and then much a band equally a law line-up, the six fiends higher up united states are tuning and shuffling and smirking, part weary, part tweak-y, half dead.These itchy fools... they look similar they odor of cum, and were you to claw at their margarine faces the flesh might come up away like wet newspaper. Together they weigh as much as a homo, and await similar the bits of many men, cobbled together from the aftermath of some machete massacre – intestinal smiles, colonic heart sockets, toes for fingers. Long penises glide to the lesser of light denim shorts, stilted by os-legs with sores and puncture wounds like brown spiders. Their ribcage frames comport the hallmarks of many one-room adventures holed-up in that squat of theirs in Brixton.
The room goes from cherry to blue to nicotine yellow, as the phase lighting wheels slowly, and on red again my eyes autumn on the bass player. Here he is, the WASP beach-male child predator of your nightmares; the type of guy who fingers your sis in the bluish Corvette his daddy bought him. And I sentinel as he tucks his big tongue into his bottom lip and, with his instrument, pretend-fucks the black back hole of his roadie'southward skull, unbeknownst to the roadie, knelt in forepart of him piffling innocently with wires.
And on blue again Luke leans over and whispers in my ear, "This is making me horny", which feels how I imagine a wet willy would in the meat-play room in some Dutch fuck-dungeon. They play their first note and the speakers groan in complaint, evacuating fluorescent pus out onto the floor and around your ankles. The vocal is 'Garden Of The Numb', the closer to their debut LP, Champagne Holocaust. It is horrible.
They are grinning. "You would sell your mother's cunt to open doors. I'd similar to sentinel yous burning while you lot dance."
Rewind threescore minutes, to just subsequently the sun has gone. I am walking the high-walled perimeter outside an abased Georgian-era aviary for the mentally ill. They named it St Clements Hospital. It is the setting for tonight'due south show.
Here I am, lost for some lonely minutes on the other side of the fence, circling the site. I am dragging my fingers on orange bricks, in the sodium-orange channel between a element of group vii Tesco's and the house of horrors leering from the other side of the masonry, looking for a way in.
It'due south my belief that a lot of people alive their lives this way: caught between a halogen normality and the looming threat of mental illness, tracing its chalky walls with their fingers, in the shadow of its night-bluish outlines overhead, waiting for a door to open upwards, through which lies full blown psychosis - the interior life that's as big as a universe when you lot're prisoner to eternal disorientation.
This is the door that Fat White Family unit opened on their own.
When eventually I notice the archway to the complex, and I'g greeted by affable doormen and the fairy-lit path backside them, I observe a sign left of the path. The sign reads:
THIS IS A DERELICT SITE. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
Back in Victorian times when St Clements was a workhouse, people died here. So it was down to convenience that the medical contumely kept the workhouse's in-house morgue, complete with adjoining cemetery. In psychiatric hospitals, you encounter, people also die often.
It occurs the art-therapy theatre Fat White Family are due to play is, geographically speaking, the terminal stop before soul paralysis or expiry. And what I tin can say is that this band, this strange band, take taken this dangerous project of theirs that far, and that it is by choice. Considering, correct now, you see, the lives they live are lived fathoms below the halo of gilt wellbeing, the garland of the blest, that I passed through on the way to the theatre: the ringed glow sent from the lives of those happy normal people, the people who perhaps selected tonight'southward outcome from a listings guide, and for whom enjoying their weekends comes piece of cake, and who maybe are the blazon of people that tin can become through a whole day without medicine or crippling boredom, or thoughts of fourth dimension running out, or headaches and ulcers and the sensation of having lived as well long, and time passing too slowly.
In a day and age when anything is marketable, letting a bit of crazy in is maybe the terminal option bachelor to today'south iconoclasts, if they're to create an authentic 'alternative'. The roots of Fat White prevarication with Foucault, or specifically Foucault'south 'limit experience', a process whereby personal enlightenment is achieved by surrendering to the extremes of what we find near objectionable - be it self-loathing, concrete suffering, depravity, affliction or masochism - with the terminal goal a painful but ecstatic epiphany. Call it metamorphosis by deterioration. And Foucault believed that freeing our mind from ordered order meant, above all, ceding to insanity, as did another antecedent of Fat White Family unit's - the Surrealists, for whom emancipation meant eviscerating our accustomed perception of reality, and by extension our perception of morality equally defined by the establishment, every bit is stated in the Manifesto:"'[Surrealism is]... the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised past reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupations".
Then here we are, and "La La La" goes 'Auto Neutron', and I similar these little voices. It'due south like the dead finish children at play - the children of the finish times and this, the cultural full-cease that is Fat White Family. Or rather, children played by men, loftier-stepping arm-in-arm like an idiot Tin Can line; swimming in the panting blab of a boudoir drum automobile or rolling their hips to Saul'southward snake-charming solo, until somewhen the line goes expressionless and the lightbulbs of the song burn incandescent and pop. The band collapse in different directions. They are screaming. The drummer, known simply as Dan, who stares for long periods of time into outer space and who looks a fleck like a gay Eminem, is screaming too. Sitting downwards and screaming. A guy to our left removes his belt and simulates self-flagellation. Saul animates that diagonal smile of his, and a crease goes up his temple similar a septic artery. Anybody else just stares.
Then comes The Cramps-ian 'Sky On Earth', and what we have is some prairie punk romp pushed upside down past an empty amphetamine express mirth - but which tonight is turned a very British shade of vomit. At present it is an finish-of-the-pier terror-ride, panicked past Blackpool wurlitzer and off-tone guitar notes. It is the Great britain of Dennis Potter - the twin vocalists' numb baritone chorus the dreary skies against which rose the sickly ersatz Americana of our seaside palaces, Blighty's very ain 20th Century nightmare.
Indie'due south been surf-garage rockin' for years now, but the freaks do information technology better. The New Labour kids... they have no ear for the horrors below the wash, the rotten America: the macabre undercurrent that ran the length of Californian youth culture, with the shadow of Manson growing, waiting to call fourth dimension; how the new dawn was besides an apocalypse. They'd rather only sing what they think they ought to, buried deep in mass product.
It appears the members are operating at varying levels of cognisance; depending, y'all sense, on chosen pharmaceutical. Some are hither, some not anywhere at all. Utility vocalist and resident banshee Lias Saoudi, for example, is an over-metabolised dynamo; a wired rave coincidental with Hacienda defunction and the face of a mantis, who when he isn't bent double sucking air into frail lungs is winding his naked torso with sweaty glee. Conversely, to his left stands Saul Adamczewski. Saul Adamczewski, with his tombstone teeth and Transylvanian eyebrows, with his zombie eye-rings and cut, knobbly knees; a hairy-palmed cunt with a funny secret and something awful in his heart, who wipes his streaming nose with a curled hand and is fidgety even when approached by his bandmates.
Incidentally, he'south also the lead guitarist, and a pretty snazzy 1 to kick, armed with a surprisingly impressive array of tricks. With burnt-out FX he explodes the psychedelic glam of 'Special Ape' beyond its garage constraints and up into peyote hallucinations defenseless over some nuclear desert town. Then on 'Without Consent' a phaser pedal transforms the cherry-pie semiotics of 50s America into some industrial fever dream - all metal-on-bone and beaten-downwardly manufactory stiffs on the verge of early death. It is skillful music – none of this practiced ramshackle amateurism the indie boys favour: good songwriting, strong melodies and nice Nuggets-era catamenia item. More than importantly, it is expert rock & scroll: stone & roll with the blood slowed to a nighttime sweetness and just like how it began, with Trivial Richard, Roy, Jerry Lee - psychotic, monstrous, doomed.
Simply they're never more menacing than when they're laughing at your expense; when the killing joke lands and they snigger as oblivion takes them. Introducing the riotous 'Bomb Disneyland' and 'Is Information technology Raining In Your Mouth?', I haven't had this much fun since my blood brother's cat died and he cried similar a Greek nana. Typically mutant and packed to the gills with penetrating imagery, 'Is It Raining In Your Mouth?' is like a blowjob fantasy imagined by Busby Berkeley and starring the cast of Ed Gein: The Musical. Lias is dancing again, this time like a cadger in a babydoll apparel, while gay Eminem stokes his fire. "Five sweaty fingers on the dashboard," they sing. "Five sweaty fingers with a criminal'due south confront," equally the song climbs towards orgasm. Soon it's HIM being fucked, and presently it's HIM that's screaming. And soon Luke is dancing, and so anybody's dancing. So, hell's bells, even I'thou dancing. When I trip the light fantastic toe I expect like a goose chasing a yogurt pot around a petrol station.
For 40-odd minutes I have make clean forgotten we're standing in a psychiatric hospital. Therapy past art, indeed: music as solar day release, with the audience movedelsewhere, outside ourselves. And nosotros all need a bit of that every now and then. Their deadly lullaby, 'Cream Of The Young', sashes all the way through my chewed guts. 'Cream Of The Young'... in which the but cure for the imaginary animals crawling under their peel is sex; in which - part pleading, part titillated - the dead end kids pleasure the pain in them. And it is then I call back that quondam Ken Kesey conundrum on the insane: is it they who are the mad ones, or maybe is it us?
Still alone backside the walls, I am rattling the cast iron gates into the circuitous like a caged monkey, on the outside looking in, my sense of meaningless outrage bubbling over while a couple walk effectually me in a large wary arc. Symbolically speaking, information technology's not the best of omens. I grin moronically considering I'm embarrassed, which is what people do in such situations, and which, in a certain respect, is a popularised form of mental illness.
Source: https://thequietus.com/articles/13140-fat-white-family-live-review
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