An attempt at understanding Fat Dog: “Claustrophobia seems to work in our favour”
It was 11pm on a Glastonbury Thursday night when I first encountered Fat Dog. I’d heard the name though, plenty of times. For a year, it had been whispered around the live music circuit, spreading out of Brixton’s Windmill, across London, and slowing stretching further and further, riding on the back of festival slots where the group whipped crowds of ever-crowing sizes into a frenzy. From the second they took to the stage at Strummerville, it was mass hysteria. There is no option to resist it. Their crowds quickly become so wild and so rowdy that it’s impossible. Your body will quite literally be moved for you, caught up in the sea of people that turn into crashing waves as mosh pits open and collapse, only to open again seconds later. By the time they leave the stage, your head is so rattled that it’s hard to not be wowed. But realistically, Fat Dog themselves know that it doesn’t have much to do with them.
“We could do half of what we’re doing, and they’d still have a fucking great time,” the band’s synth player Chris Hughes said. For their leader, Joe Love, he barely even needs to be a frontman. As the majority of their crowd is more caught up in the audience’s energy than ever really looking on stage, the band becomes more of a soundtrack than the attraction itself. They merely have to show up and, as Love puts it, “Just let them do what the fuck they want.”
But that’s an odd phenomenon and it’s an especially odd legacy for a new band to be building. Fat Dog are one of the leaders of the pack in a recent return to ‘word of mouth’ acts. Almost as a response to the impact social media has had on music, there has been an influx of new acts lately who are doing things the old-fashioned way. Despite being incredibly musically different, they sit in the same class as The Last Dinner Party and Picture Parlour, who developed a cultish following simply by putting on incredible live shows that leave people talking about it, with that reputation growing their audience year on year.
The story of Fat Dog starts just like that. It begins as nothing more than Love making tunes at home, but Love himself isn’t the best one to tell the story. “It started in 2020 during lockdown,” he begins, then stops as if that’s the end. His bandmates fill in the gaps, “On your laptop,” Hughes said, with saxophone player Morgan Wallace adding, “On windows”. This pattern emerges throughout our chat. Love is largely passive, but on either side of him, the additional musicians brought into the band over time carry the excitement.
Perhaps that’s because they were captivated by the exact same spell that the band are casting across their crowds. Both Hughes and Wallace joined the band after first seeing a gig. “I’d not been to a gig like that in a long time,” Hughes said, “Joe was making the music we wanted to hear. There wasn’t much of that going about London at the time.” It was the same story for Wallace, whose dedication to the group was earned the second she felt the energy they made, not so much musically, but among their crowd.
“We’d just done rehearsals in a Pirate studio, and I was like, ‘These are good tunes’”, she remembered, “But then we did the gig, and I was like ‘oh, I didn’t know it was going to be like this’”. Even from on the stage, it stands out as a live music highlight as she added, “I’d never been to a gig like that.”
Then it’s a tale as old as time. The crowds grew from three to ten to 50 to huge packed stages. When I caught them again at Truck festival, a crowd member left the tent exclaiming, “That’s mainstage energy.” But when I tell the band that, they don’t seem that interested. “We’d have to change a bit to be a mainstage band. I think we sound so much better when we play closed-off smaller things,” Love says, shrugging off the idea of levelling up. “Claustrophobia seems to work in our favour,” Hughes says.
They seem pretty happy with where they are, and, in fact, they’d rather keep the newcomers away. Talking about the influx of attention that seems to follow them as the old-school punks and so-called 6 Music dads find their way into the crowds, the band would rather they fuck off. “I want to piss everyone off, all the bald dads who come see us and are all like ‘they’re fucking punk mate, this is how it used to be’. I just want to piss them off and make really shitty pop music,” Love says.
It’s a joke, of course, but it doesn’t feel like one, as there is a clear contrarian streak to Love and his band. The way they talk about their music lacks the kind of passion or devotion that’s usually found in interviews. Instead, it’s a string of one-words and half-thoughts that makes any journalist feel more like a dentist pulling teeth. When asked if they ever wish people would mosh less and listen more, they say, “Yeah, maybe.” When asked about how they hope the album will go down or how they want people to engage with their music outside of a live setting, they say, “Maybe on a bus”. When asked about their journey and swift growth, Wallace says, “It’s been great” as Love points out for me, “That was a terrible answer”. They have no grand thoughts or feelings on their upcoming album, no deeper wonderments about their growth, and no real opinions of the energy of their shows.
But I guess, to them, that’s the point; there is no point. So I try to get them talking about that, guiding the conversation onto the idea that theirs isn’t mind music to be analysed or considered. Instead, it’s body music to move to. It’s music ‘no thinking’ music to make you turn your brain off and just surrender to nonsense and noise, and maybe that’s what people need at the moment. To that, they say, “Yeah, it’s big-time body music.”
“Electronic musicians never talk that much about stuff. That’s the whole thing of electronics; it doesn’t have to mean something so big all the time,” Love says, “I think shit is sometimes way more powerful if you just don’t even open your fucking mouth.” So, with that, I say my goodbyes.
