Ahead of the release of their debut album, WOOF, hotly tipped South-London five-piece Fat Dog bring their howling arsenal of dance-punk bangers to Sheffield for two shows this autumn.
In anticipation of the release and the Sheffield dates, Ash Birch caught up with keyboard and synth player, Chris Hughes, firstly to try and help him navigate the mystical lands of Shadwell, but secondly (and maybe more pertinently) to discuss who would win in a fight with Ringo Starr, his love of Sheffield’s Fat Cat pub and time travel!
Welcome to the surreal world of Fat Dog…
As the Zoom call fires into life, I’m greeted with a Blair Witch POV of Chris’ nostrils, as he distractedly lurches about a warren of unfamiliar London streets. “I’m somewhere in Shadwell,” he tells me. “I woke up in my friend’s house, but I’ve never been to it before. I’m very confused!”
At this point, his phone switches into ‘safe driving mode,’ as if even his device needs to preserve itself from the chaos of the morning.
“I don’t know where all my money went last night, but I’ve woken up in a strange land.”
After a suitably surreal start to the chat, Chris attempts to find a greasy spoon. Feeling thwarted, and with police ominously circling, he settles into a recently inhabited “pissy London phone box” and, while resting his arm on something that definitely hasn’t been used to make calls for some time, we get down to the business of Fat Dog.
Up until recently, Fat Dog have been a rare and mysterious commodity in the music industry. At the time they showed up on our radar late last summer, unless you were lucky enough to stumble upon a show, searching for info on the band was a bit of a ghost hunt.
With just one epic single, ‘King of the Slugs’, released at that point and sparse social media coverage, aside from a few videos made by Lou Smith, there was something of the old school about how they had built their following. This diet of slogging it out on the London gig circuit will probably keep them well-fed in the long term, as other bands of the same ilk begin to starve on empty social media calories.
“Fundamentally, we’re all really fucking disorganised people,” explains Chris, “but the intent was there. I think it builds a stronger foundation when you don’t release music immediately.
“Because so much music is released every day, and because it’s so easy to do, the market is saturated, and if you just release stuff, and you haven’t actually played that many gigs, then it’s likely that all your music is going to get lost in the wind.
“Whereas we decided to just keep gigging and wait for the right people to come along and release it in a really great way.
“We built hype organically, rather than forcing it. It means that the actual listeners that we have were already becoming hardcore fans, because they’d had to physically commit to a gig anyway. I think that’s built a really nice sense of community within our fans, and for us as well.
“Even before I joined the band (Chris joined in 2022, after initially auditioning as a violin player, despite only allowing himself a week to learn violin… and being a bass player by trade!), it was a gig or two a week for the longest time. This year, we’ve already played more than 50 shows, and that kind of work ethic makes you a better musician.”
Another rationale for the delayed release of the first single was that the band, and in particular songwriter and frontman, Joe Love, had begun to feel the pressure to get it right. “You want to put your strongest food forward. It had to be perfect. You can’t do a debut release after all this hype and flop it,” explains Chris.
Despite being excited about the upcoming album and the idea of fans finally getting to hear the recordings, Chris admits that, at least for him, the live performances are what excite him most. “I’m a bit of a caveman. You put an instrument in front of me. I play it. The studio side of it boggles my mind, but what’s nice about the studio, is you have the opportunity to experiment. Sort of like how an animator can animate anything they want. That’s kind of what it feels like when you’re in a studio.
“We’ve been playing these songs for such a long time, it’s nice that they’ll suddenly be physically out, and we can start maybe trying to write new stuff. We built this foundation as a live band, so it’ll be interesting to see how people react to hearing these songs on record, versus kind of smelling the songs live.”
The songs have been sniffed out by live audiences for a couple of years now but were originally written by Joe during lockdown as a reaction to the serious, and at times sanctimonious, bands that surrounded him.
“Joe was in a post-punk band, and I think he just got bored of it and wanted to make music he wanted to hear. He started writing these crazy dance tracks and I think he got lonely playing them on stage on his own. He was a bit like William Shatner doing covers of Beatles songs or something, so he decided it would be a good idea to get some actual other human beings on stage.
“I think, musically, you feel better when you have other people on stage, because you have this connection. I think the connection is one of the most important driving forces in music. When you look across at other people in the band and you’re not saying anything to each other, but you kind of have that stank face, and you’re all like, oh, that’s good – that’s addictive.”
Fat Dog live are notorious as a relentless force; battering techno-infused synths, insistent repetitive sax and Balkan-influenced guitar lines mean there’s a lot going on musically, but there’s more than just the noise to be enjoyed at one of their shows.
Whether it’s drummer Johnny ‘Doghead’ Hutch and his latex dog head mask, synchronised dance routines or Chris donning a sort of monk’s cloak to deliver an ominous monologue midway through the set, Fat Dog is a visual assault. “We always hope that the music is the best bit, but you’ve got to have a little bit of theatrics in there.
“My favourite thing is writing intense-sounding bullshit so I’m the speech guy in the band – I do big word good.”
Part of Chris’ responsibility as ‘speech guy’ was penning the album’s opening monologue, ‘Vigilante’, which is delivered by Northern actor Neil Bell (Dead Man’s Shoes) who also occasionally joins the band on stage.
“We wanted Vincent Price, like on Thriller, but it turns out he’s fucking dead.” laments Chris. “Neil’s a great guy. He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and we ended up getting on like a house on fire. He also thought he might get to Glastonbury on a free ticket, if he did it!”
Neil was originally hired to perform in the video for recent single, ‘All The Same’, where he plays a disgruntled father, who travels back in time to kick himself in the balls because he hates his kids.
“The reality of time travel would be instant insanity,” says Chris, “If I could travel back in time, I think I’d leave a microwave in the past and not do anything else, really fuck with them. Or just one packet of Nik Naks. Even the notion of the packaging would fuck with them. It would become a relic. It’d be a Nik Nak-based economy.
“Actually, I’d rather bring someone from the past into modern times; put a medieval knight on the South Western Railway. To be honest, time travel would be good, but only if you could go back to like dinosaur times. Any other time period of civilisation would just be confusing.
“I can’t speak for the band, but I think we’d all like to be the same dinosaur. It’s got to be a diplodocus; it’s the everyman of dinosaurs. It has its place and eats leaves really well, but it’s not some crazy jock predator. Just a well-rounded bloke, with a long neck and he’s probably pretty sound.
“You can tell a lot about a person by the dinosaur they choose.”
Wrestling the conversation back to Fat Dog, I ask Chris where the band’s name comes from?
“Fat Dog is an idea, and you can’t kill an idea.” explains Chris, “The story behind the name is actually pretty shit but I can make one up?”
There’s only one correct answer here. We’re all ears, speech guy…
“We walked for seven days and seven nights in search of a name. We walked to the highest peak and there was, at the top of this mountain, a man. A man holding one bucket of water and a fishing rod, and he stood on one leg. We asked him who are we? He looked at us and he smiled, and he whispered, ‘Fat Dog.’
“Every band name is shit until you make it. Imagine Cream playing to six people in a pub. The Beatles is one of the worst band names of all time. I was staring at it the other day, and who the fuck thought it should be spelled that way? That is insane. I just wanna slap Ringo Starr in the face! Actually, Ringo looks like he could still handle himself, he’s got that crazy aura about him.
“I reckon if I slapped Paul McCartney in the face, it would be like slapping ice cream.”
Beatle-bashing aside, with the imminent release of the album comes the inevitable touring schedule and they head to Sheffield twice in the coming months. It’s a fact Chris is very pleased about.
“Sheffield is one of my favourite places I’ve ever been to. You guys got this pub, I think it’s called The Fat Cat, where you can get a pie and a pint and it feels like a hug from your mum or something.
“Sheffield is an underrated place, but I don’t want too many people from London to find out and move there, I want you guys to keep it to yourselves.”
As well as enjoying the opportunity to take in Kelham boozers, the band will also be busy writing new material. “We’re trying to write new stuff whenever we get the opportunity.
“Joe wrote the majority of the songs this time, because it’s how it’s worked on this album – we weren’t even in the band when the songs were written.
“We’re all kind of scared to bring things to Joe, sometimes. I’ll write something at home, and I’ll be like, maybe Joe will like this, and I just never show it to him. I’m trying to get a bit more confident. For Joe, it’s never been a matter of, I write the songs, you guys play the songs. He’s always joking that he’s a cow with no more milk left.
“I probably should have been writing last night but I was swept away by the currents of culture.”
Fat Dog play the Leadmill on Saturday 28th September as part of Float Along Festival and Crookes Social Club on 14th November – you’d be barking mad to miss it.
