Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure

Product Information

This gives additional dimension to all of that trauma — and, if the words can be trusted, these men’s tolerance for abusing their bodies (and surviving) may not have a rival. Though she has done her work, interviewing Nathan and Saul extensively, as well as others, this book both starts and ends with Lias.

His partner, a demure and painfully involved French aristocrat, seemed to be hanging off the wrong arm.One song stood out, Tastes Good with the Money, and that was added to the Likes list to have an occasional play. In many ways, this is a rock book that is less about music and more about race and class, as it was a surprise to find that the often half-naked and addled Lias of the band’s incendiary live shows was also a fine art student at the prestigious Slade School in London.

Her books include the Sunday Times bestseller, Ten Thousand Apologies, and Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, a fictionalised biography inspired by the playwright Andrea Dunbar. At a Glastonbury where Nathan has champagne chucked in his face by band hero Mark E Smith and retaliates by chucking some cider into Smith’s face!Like a good documentary, a good music book will get you interested in an artist who you previously had no interest in. Back in May, Lias Saoudi, frontman of Fat White Family, said he’s working on a book about sex therapy.

The drugs taking is, as I've already hinted at, off the scale… heroin, cocaine, acid, meth, ketamine etc. I too moved to Sheffield for distance and peace and quiet, glad reading this coincided with the new release - I needed that. There is an amusing account of a bunch of ill-prepared junkies, setting out on the worst hike in history that nearly killed off the band’s main members, which would have been a suitably pathetic way to exit rock and roll. Those familiar with the Fat White Family, either through their genre bending records, legendary live performances, or wretched reputation, will thoroughly enjoy this honest, funny, and sometimes bleak autobiography of the band and its central figures. While he may not be the most likeable, I think this book reenforces Saoudi as one of the most sincere, vulnerable, and non-commercialized musical talents today and I am thankful for that.

Restless, without respite’: Lias Saoudi performing with Fat White Family at Crystal Palace Bowl, London, in 2021. She was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, Portico Prize for Literature and Penderyn Music Book Prize. Co-written with lucidity and humour by singer Lias Saoudi and acclaimed author Adelle Stripe, Ten Thousand Apologies is that rare thing: a music book that barely features any music, a biography as literary as any novel, and a confessional that does not seek forgiveness. Having loved Adelle Stripe's Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, I was instantly attracted to Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure (2022).