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

Product Information

girlfriend, who also played synth for the group at the time, that he didn’t have another pair of trousers to change into.

Ten Thousand Apologies” is surely one of the most grimly compelling books ever written about the dehumanising effects of the music industry. If you love what we do, you can help tQ to continue bringing you the best in cultural criticism and new music by joining one of our subscription tiers. 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). Some wiseguy once said that a photograph is worth a couple of dozen sentences and there's not enough adjectives to describe what's going on in this book. His work has appeared in Creem, Rolling Stone, New York Post, NME, Melody Maker, National Enquirer et al.

Like a tragicomic penny dreadful dreamed up by a mutant hybrid of Jean Genet, the Dadaists and Mark E. Smith, the Fat Whites’ story is a frequently jaw-dropping epic of creative insurrection, narcotic excess, mental illness, wanderlust, self-sabotage, fractured masculinity, and the ruthless pursuit of absolute art. It is also funny in a tragi-comic way especially when Nathan, and bizarrely his mum, get into a row with the tiresome Mark E. This is the story of a band that’s always on the brink: of stardom, of madness, of brilliance, of disgrace.

But “Ten Thousand Apologies” is so much more than a story of artistic hedonism (however gut-wrenchingly gripping those sections are). But as the book tore through their whirlwind of a pre-covid life and career, I was left with the profound absence of any method to the madness. There are two miracles in this brutally honest account of the rise and spectacular fall of Fat White Family, who despite their chaotic existence remain one of the more interesting British bands this century. As a mother myself, I would like to bend these bad, bad boys over my knee and give them all a well-deserved spanking.Nathan got hold of the freshly poured vintage and without a second thought dashed its contents straight into Mark’s face and down his trousers.

Back in May, Lias Saoudi, frontman of Fat White Family, said he’s working on a book about sex therapy.Fully bound in purple cloth covered boards; front cover artwork embossed in black; acid-free Fedrigoni paper; Fabriano Tiziano mid-blue endpapers. 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. It is concerned with the travails of the art-rock provocateurs Fat White Family, whose tales of poverty, addiction, mental illness, and the drudgery of touring might be completely off-putting on the page if they weren’t written in such a bleakly hilarious way by author Adelle Stripe and Lias Saoudi (the latter the singer with the aforementioned band).