As Fat Dog drop their debut album Woof via Domino (September 6), here's a chance to revisit our Radar interview with the band.
Here, frontman Joe Love takes us back to the start, talks disaffected youth and their LP…
WORDS: NIALL DOHERTY
The first time that Fat Dog frontman Joe Love felt his band were onto something happened to be at the group’s first gig where the audience were allowed to stand up. Formed in lockdown, initially with Love as the sole member, the South London-based five-piece rambled through their first few shows with the crowd sitting. It was not a pleasant experience.
“We just thought we were very shit,” is how Love puts it. But Fat Dog are not very shit. They are very good, and they make music that is not designed to be sat down to, a mind-bending meld of chaotic electro-punk, experimental techno and warped pop. This is music beckoning you to cut loose, which is exactly what happened when they supported Automotion, the band featuring Liam Gallagher’s son Lennon on vocals and guitar, at West London’s Laylow in July 2021. With a frenzied crowd in front of them and no chairs in sight, suddenly Fat Dog’s psychedelic wildness all made sense.
“It was nice to see people actually fucking move to it,” says Love, over the phone on a crisp, cold morning in early January.
He’s in the studio putting the final touches to the group’s forthcoming debut album, a record that he imagines will always sound unfinished in his head. He loves reworking songs on his laptop and when he began the project that became Fat Dog, he wasn’t enamoured with the idea of playing live.
It’s from their fierce gigs that word began to spread about the quintet, though, their performances honed at Brixton’s Windmill. By October 2023, they’d sold out the Scala, and they’re now gearing up for another hometown show at the 1,500-capacity Electric Brixton. When Love looks out from the stage now, he sees teenagers determined to make up for enforced nights in during the pandemic.
“It’s people who were locked inside too much, all these 17-year-olds,” he says. “When you’re 15, it’s a bit much, you don’t want to be locked inside.”
Fat Dog shows are what the disaffected youth of 2020-2021 get to steal their time back.
It’s not just live where Love’s band are forging a reputation. There’s also been two fantastic single releases: the first, last year’s King Of The Slugs, was a sprawling, synth-heavy spaghetti junction epic that sounded like a demented cross between Late Of The Pier, Gogol Bordello, Nine Inch Nails and Working Men’s Club over its seven minutes, whilst January follow-up All The Same was a short, sharp burst of snarling electronic rock.
“I think it’s a bit annoying to be one of those bands who release 17 seven or eight-minute songs,” Love explains. “All The Same was more of a pop banger.”
His mind drawn to the track, he suddenly diverts. “Did you hear an eagle in it?” he asks. A what, sorry? “An eagle,” he says, sounding dejected. “We fucked up the mix. We should have popped it up a bit.”
How did they record an eagle?
“It was just YouTube MP3s. I’d love to say that I went down and recorded it live, but I’d be lying…”
Other than birds of prey being buried too low in the mix, Love hasn’t had much else to grumble about. Fat Dog’s success so far caught him by surprise. Fired from his old band Peeping Drexels for being a “lazy bum” and influenced by a performance he’d witnessed by the now-defunct London crew The Intergalactic Republic Of Kongo, he began to make home demos during Covid as a way to keep himself sane. With more music clogging up his hard drives, he envisioned turning it into a band, something brought to fruition once he could leave the house.
“Finding a drummer is the hypest thing,” he says. “It makes it real. The recordings I did at home were bloody shocking compared to what we’ve done together as a band.”
He credits the Windmill’s long-running boss and booker, Tim Perry, for allowing them to fine-tune their live show. Perry had initially booked Love for a solo show before the singer even had a name for his new project – Fat Dog was chosen about 30 minutes before he took to the stage.
“Tim gives people shots,” says Love. “He gets about a million emails a day saying, ‘Can we play?’ – all these 18-year-olds from Sevenoaks – and he gives them a go and if they’re good, that gives them a stepping stone.”
For Love and his bandmates, it led to the attention of Domino, the label turning up to random shows unexpectedly.
“They’d come to gigs at the Old Dispensary in Camberwell,” he says, “Laurence [Bell, Domino chief] would come, too. That’s the sort of shit you want. Domino is nice and family-based. Jordan Whitmore, our A&R, is a top bloke. He lets me do my thing.”
There was some major label interest, Love suggests, but the singer says it wasn’t the vibe he was after.
“I hear people getting dropped from that shit all the time,” he says. “I want to be able to think about what album I’m going to do after this. The music is the most important thing for me.”
Mulling over his experience of the industry so far, he says he hasn’t got a clue.
“I just think about music and my managers deal with the other shit,” he shrugs. “When a kebab place is selling pizza, and fish and chips, you know it’s gonna be a shit kebab; you’ve gotta focus on what you’re doing,” he concludes, leaving the uncertain metaphor hanging somewhere in the middle of our phone signal. You won’t find him expending any energy in boosting the band’s social media profile, either.
“I’ve always had [other] people in the band doing Instagram,” he says. “I hate TikTok and shit like that. My girlfriend is addicted to Instagram. I see her watching Reels and I’ll watch 10 with her and then my brain starts melting and I start feeling like I’m going to explode. Music is something that’s real.”
That’s where Love’s focus will be as 2024 unfurls.
“A good album coming out, making tunes and keeping it going,” are his main aims for the year.
Fat Dog are helping people unleash themselves. So let go, and don’t forget to listen out for the eagle.
ESSENTIAL INFO
RELEASES: All The Same, King Of The Slugs (both out now)
LABEL: Domino
MANAGEMENT: Matt Jacob, Memphis Industries and Lloyd Young, Permanent Creeps
WHAT THE TEAM SAY: Jordan Whitmore, A&R Director, Domino:
“Fat Dog’s genre-bending approach to music and cathartic live shows are attracting crowds all over Europe. The shows can feel like cult meetings with Joe Love taking the role of preacher, and the crowd, his disciples. They are always surprising and striving to create music that pushes boundaries. I’m excited to see where they will go from here.”
