In spite of being charged by the NSW Police for indecent exposure following a rather naked performance at 2016’s Splendour in the Grass, Fat White Family are returning to Australia to tour their new record, Forgiveness is Yours. While not quite at the Mark E. Smith-esque level of constantly changing band members, the lineup does shift around Saoudi’s central vision, which is as much performance art as it is provocative, progressive music.
As one of Dave Berman’s (Silver Jews, Purple Mountains) most dedicated fangirls, I’m both delighted and surprised when Saoudi tells me that he’s been writing an essay on the late, great poet and musician. It’s a singular answer to the question, “What have you been doing this week?”— a question that’s been asked millions of times. Part of Berman’s appeal for Saoudi is that he’s a “words man smuggling himself into the world through song,” perfectly describing Berman’s last Purple Mountains record as “an anatomy of depression".
Returning to Saoudi’s own art and the struggles for artists, he explains: “I mean, it's kind of like an impossible kind of time period that we live in. Like, there's an overweight legacy from the days of plenty where people's perception is concerned. There isn’t any way of making a living anymore, really, you know?” I wish I could say this is the first artist of Saoudi’s stature I’ve heard say this, but it’s becoming more and more common. I’m curious as to whether there’s a strategy for survival: “How do I manage it? I think I just have, every now and then, a nervous breakdown, you know?” The lines between humour and reality are somewhat blurred in Saoudi’s response.
Yet, in this current age of ‘productivity', it’s not just artists who are dealt a rough hand, resulting in breakdowns. Saoudi explains that he builds a “cathedral of self” that is often destroyed by reality, and then the arrogance dissipates as one “pays the piper, as it were, you know, but in private... your vanity chickens come home to roost,” resulting in moral collapse as a coping mechanism, of sorts. In a world that values productivity, Saoudi is still trying to provide art for art’s sake, and while poetry and romance have little space in this world, what do these concepts look like for him?
“I think what we have nowadays is a kind of hesitation and kind of punctuation; nothing is permanent. I think, with romance, you kind of imbue something with meaning that may or may not be there. You know, it’s like a narrativising capacity that you have – that’s all anybody is doing, right? They’re all just telling themselves stories about themselves and the world, and then trying to live out these stories. Or maybe they’re their own story. That grew out of somebody else’s story, or whatever. But it’s kind of – and I guess that’s inevitably, kind of romantic to some extent.”
I posit that this is rather Didion-esque, telling ourselves stories to live, to which Saoudi says, “You don’t really have any choice. I think what’s happening in the world now, [is this kind of idea that] everything is kind of superfluous. Our ability to dwell and to contemplate is being replaced by just calculation, you know? There’s a difference between thinking and calculation; there’s a difference between community and communication. I think it’s to do with space, the meditative, the way we relate to things. Everything is just completely...I don’t know? There’s just an impermanence to everything.”
For Saoudi, “everything is in lieu of production,” explaining that everything is “about expansion and growth doesn’t matter,” and that people are kind of “exhausted by having to become themselves...this endless self-optimization. I think fitness culture and wellness culture tie into that, because with no other kind of spiritual or transcendental mode, with no ritual space that we can kind of forget about ourselves within. That’s all there is. It’s just endless self-expansion. And eventually, the ego overheats, because you can’t chase all the hares, and I think that’s when the anxiety and depression eventually come in. And that’s why there’s this kind of, like, epidemic level of depression. That’s why everybody’s on medication. That’s why everybody’s kind of in all kinds of therapies, you know? Because it’s like, you can’t actually – you can’t split yourself that many ways. It’s not feasible.”
That said, Saoudi is creatively productive. He plays in three groups and is currently trying to write two books, having already released four albums with Fat White Family and published the book Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure. However, his constant flurry of creativity eventually leads him to collapse. “Like, I can’t. It’s like multitasking. It’s like the glorification of the multitasker. It’s like, fucking animals multitask. A wild animal has to kind of keep its eye on, the prey, and its mate, and its fucking environment, you know? I mean, an animal there’s nothing civilised about multitasking.” Saoudi’s ire for elements of the modern world extends to “this machine in your pocket.” “If you ever find yourself in a club at three in the morning, in the toilet after you’ve done some suspect drugs or whatever, and you’re checking your emails...You shouldn’t be able to check your emails when you’re out on your night out, but you are. You made the decision that you’re condemning yourself.” Although at the time of speaking, the election results hadn’t yet happened, we still managed to discuss an “auto-exploitative” culture, where “every person is like God, and like a prisoner.”
Late-night club dwellers will be disappointed to know that there is less 3am email checking for Saoudi these days, as he focuses on written work. “I’m trying to swim from one sinking ship to another, you know? Print media, ‘Oh, that must be great over there!’ So I’m doing that at the moment and going on walks.” Yet, Fat White Family continues, despite serious mental illness, pain, hard drug use, and a declining music industry. As the lyricist of Fat White Family and a writer – perhaps poet in his own right – Saoudi explains: “Poetry stands on its own two feet. Lyrics can just be this patina of verbiage that sits on top of the music. You’re kind of describing the melody, or at least, I think you should be. It doesn’t have to be something that would look great written down. There’s a get-out clause there. But I just think once you start writing prose, it becomes harder and harder to go back to lyrics. I also think, when you’re young, music means so much more. When you’re 15 to 25, you know, it’s everything. But I don’t know, as you get older and become kind of more meditative, I just spend more and more time in literature, you know?”
While Saoudi doesn’t feel he has reached “national treasure” status with his art, “national disruptor” suits him in his self-proclaimed “dotage.” In between working on Fat White Family records, The Moonlandings, Decius, and his written prose, he explains, “I would rather go to the cinema every now and then, travel a bit, eat Thai food, smoke a bit of weed in the evening. You know, I don’t want to do anything. And I mean, I don’t want to have to focus on anything anymore. Ready to retire. I just want to read interesting books and sit around on my ass and, like, have a bath in the evening. I like a nice bath.” While I echo the love of baths and interesting books, let’s hope that retirement commences after the Australian tour.
For tickets and dates, visit Frontier Touring.
