Fat White Family story snared by White Rabbit

White Rabbit has secured a deal for Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure, about the “country’s most notorious rock band”. 

Publisher Lee Brackstone acquired world rights and from Matthew Hamilton at the Hamilton Agency. Ten Thousand Apologies will be published on 24th February 2022 in hardback, e-book and audio. 

Co-written by lead singer Lias Saoudi and author Adelle Stripe, Ten Thousand Apologies promises to be “that rare thing: a music book that barely features any music, a biography as literary as any novel, and a confessional that does not seek forgiveness,” White Rabbit said.

The Fat White Family are a rock band formed in south London a decade ago. It traces the group from Algeria to the squats of south London via sectarian Northern Ireland. “Loved and loathed in equal measure since their formation in 2011, the relentlessly provocative, stunningly dysfunctional ‘drug band with a rock problem’ have dedicated themselves to constant chaos and total creative freedom at all costs,” the publisher said. 

“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.” 

Stripe said: “It’s an honour to be working with Lias Saoudi and Lee Brackstone on this wild road trip of a book. Ten Thousand Apologies tells the stories of the degenerate characters who created the songs and reveals the grubby beginnings of the cast who performed them. I hope this book adds to their myth, which is, as any music fan knows, the only thing that matters. I’ll never write another music book and have now booked a course of therapy. The struggle continues.” 

Saoudi said: “Other than being able to finally indulge my literary pretensions to the utmost, the best thing about co-writing this book is that I've been left in almost full control of the narrative; free to paint my ‘comrades’ in whatever light I see fit, all the while gilding my own misdeeds in relatability, human frailty and thwarted compassion. It's been cleansing, to say the least.” 

Lee Brackstone, publisher at White Rabbit, said: “ An unexpurgated, all-killer-no-filler, teeth-shatteringly arse-quakingly vivid portrait of a band and their environment of chaos and self-loathing. Not for the faint-hearted, only the brave need apply.”