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For the past couple of years, Fat Dog have been rattling around south London’s live music circuit like a feral poltergeist. The region has become such a mecca for up-and-coming bands that it’s almost a cliche: throw a rock in any direction from Brixton tube station, odds are you’ll hit a bassist from some post-punk outfit or another. It might’ve been in this over-filled petri dish that Fat Dog first spawned, but their sound – loud, kinetic and high-octane, with overtones of techno and electronica – is one that has already outgrown the postcode.
Frontman Joe Love, 25, and synth player Chris Hughes, 24, two of the five members of Fat Dog, are meeting me at a studio in Brixton a couple of weeks before their debut album WOOF is sicced onto the world. Absent are bassist Jacqui Wheeler (Ben Harris on the record), drummer Johnny Hutchinson, and keyboardist/saxophonist Morgan Wallace. Things have moved rapidly for the band – who had amassed a cult following before releasing so much as a single; after signing to Domino Records in 2023 and collaborating with James Ford (known for producing Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Florence and the Machine, and Foals, among others), they finally managed to translate their sound to record. Their first single, “King of the Slugs”, was a fierce, unwieldy beast of a debut, clocking in at seven minutes and showcasing the band’s tongue-in-cheek lyrical imagination. (“I said, ‘hey there, little ditzy boy/ Why don’t you play a song for me?’” Love sings. “Well, I slide, I slide into the night/ Covered in Vaseline.”)
“It feels way more real right now,” Love tells me. He’s not wrong: Fat Dog seem to have flipped the usual musical industry roadmap on its head, letting their reputation as a boisterous live act do the talking. “[The label] said they wanted to give us media training, but if you do media training, you become a f***ing NPC,” says Love (meaning “non-player character”, a piece of gaming-derived internet jargon referring to a person lacking independent thought or introspection). “Yeah, that’s true,” adds Hughes. “You end up a bit of a bot. We’ve got some pizazz, some flair.”
It wouldn’t take Columbo to deduce that they had eschewed media training. Maybe it’s the scatty detour we take as the pair discuss the various merits and shortcomings of European cuisine (“Dutch foods is s***... You don’t see many Dutch pop-ups.”) Or their favourite types of eggs. (“Do you like Burford Browns? I would do terrible things to get some free eggs.”) Or maybe it’s when they name, with a kind of amused bluntness, the Premier League footballer that one of their girlfriends had previously “shagged”. (I’m not repeating that one.) If their offstage personas lack the kind of manic showmanship that Fat Dog fans have grown accustomed to, then they retain, at least, the sense of natural off-kilter irreverence. They might have the heft of a serious label behind them, but they are ever the scrappy outsiders.
Love founded Fat Dog during the pandemic, having turned to making demos as a way of staving off lockdown boredom. Once crowd restrictions were lifted, the band’s moshy and eccentric gigs quickly started catching alight. Hughes started out as a fan of the band and attempted to bluster his way in by auditioning to be their viola player, despite never having before played the instrument. The ruse fell apart – “Joe said it was one of the worst pieces of s*** he’d ever heard in his life” – but when the band’s synth player left, he was brought onboard regardless.
Fans immediately took to Fat Dog, and the feeling was reciprocated. How would the pair describe their own fans? “They’re absolutely unbearable people,” Love says, before breaking into laughter. “No, they’re great.” The truth is that Fat Dog’s fanbase has built, piece by piece, its own walled community; even before the band had released any music, fans were organising meetups on a Telegram group known as The Kennel – arranging to stay over at each other’s houses for faraway gigs. “We know them quite well, some of them,” Love explains. “People are getting tattoos of us now – a tramp stamp with my face on it. I think it’s pretty weird. My mum said, ‘They’re not mentally well’.” He laughs again.
But even the best live acts have the odd teething issue. Love recalls a gig in Bordeaux where their drummer was “absolutely wankered. We were headlining, and we had to cut the set short, because Johnny couldn’t make it through some of the songs.
“His girlfriend was stood there trying to give him coffee and feed him bread at the same time he was playing… you’d see him f*** it off and drink more beer. Everyone’s laughing at us. It’s like one of those nightmares. The promoter of that gig came up to us after and said, in strained English, ‘you’re a f***ing joke’.” Hughes grins: “Rage cuts through all languages.”
It was after this gig that Love claims to have encountered a UFO – an “electrical-looking glow” that descended from the sky and spoke to them. “It’s one of those ineffable moments where you realise your purpose, but you don’t know why,” he says. I scan his face for the giveaway that they are, in some way, tooling with me, but find none. “I think the quality of the gigs has gone up, because we got this… almost a divine sense of purpose,” Love adds.
It can be hard to work out exactly the vibe of Fat Dog: are they earnest eccentrics on a spiritual mission? Cynical pranksters out to cause mayhem? Their lyrics, often opaque, betray a sensibility that is hard to pin down. “Our music is doomy, but I also think there’s this undercurrent of motivation,” says Hughes, before reeling off some lyrics from another single, “Wither”: “You got one shot, only one/ Don’t you fall into the barrel of the gun/ Like a phoenix from the flames/ Don’t you hold your bald head in shame.”
This, says Hughes, is the “general ethos” of Fat Dog: “You’re gonna be alright in the end. We live in a world of difficulty, but we can also still enjoy it.” It’s music made to energise and bring catharsis, not – as both bandmates stress – to further any sort of political agenda. I’m not comfortable going on record [with our politics],” Hughes says. “I think that’s really bold, for people who have such sure visions of what’s right or wrong. But I almost consider it overly moralistic.”
“I think bands that advertise themselves as political bands, at some point or another, they always trip over their own shoelaces,” he adds. “Because they reach a point where it’s impossible for them to do what they’re doing without somehow becoming a hypocrite. I think nowadays people are really concerned about that.”
Asked what sort of future Love and Hughes want for themselves, the duo start listing animals they’d like to own – goats, pigs, dogs. “Maybe we’ll open a turkey farm, start selling artisan turkeys.” This is, they explain why the album “took so long” to make – someone would mention turkeys, and “there would be a two-hour conversation about it”. I explain that my question was more concerned with their musical aspirations. “God knows,” Love replies. “Record a soundtrack, probably. Keep making music. Always be doing it, for as long as you can. Keep that gravy train coming. And know when the gravy train will stop!”
“Some bands don’t,” Hughes chimes in. “The gravy’s turned solid, and it doesn’t taste good. No one actually wants to drink their gravy. But we should keep playing until we all hate each other. Until the fun stops.” They laugh in unison. Luckily, that doesn’t seem like any time soon.
‘WOOF’ is out now
