When the chaotic South London rabble known as Fat Dog formed, they made two rules: they were going to be a healthy band who looked after themselves –and there would be no saxophone.

Two simple edicts to live by, and two things long-since broken by the Brixton five-piece who have described themselves as 'alien preachers'.

Fat Dog are the most exciting breakthrough band of the past few years, and today they bring their frenzied presence to Oxfordshire for a set at Truck Festival, which takes over Hill Farm in Steventon until Sunday.

And while they are attracting plaudits for their brilliant and mind-bending debut album ‘WOOF.’ they would have to admit they have broken their twin pledges.

They are not healthy. One of them has a foot odour problem. And they also have a saxophone player in the line-up.

“Yeah, it’s all gone out the window,” says frontman and squadron leader Joe Love – his real name.

Life is too short to stick to any plans you made back in the unsettling, strait-jacketed times of 2021 anyway. That was when Fat Dog came together, Love deciding to form a group and take the demos he had been making at home as a way to keep himself sane during lockdown out into the world.

In Chris Hughes (keyboards/synths), Ben Harris (bass), Johnny Hutchinson (drums) and Morgan Wallace (keyboards and, yes, saxophone), Love found like-minded mavericks to help bring the dream home.

The sound Fat Dog make, Love says, is screaming-into-a-pillow music.

“I wanted to make something ridiculous because I was so bored,” he declares.

Fat Dog

It’s a thrilling blend of electro-punk, rock’n’roll snarling, techno soundscapes, industrial-pop and rave euphoria, music for letting go to.

“A lot of music at the moment is very cerebral and people won’t dance to it,” says Hughes.

“Our music is the polar opposite of thinking music. It’s music you feel in your body more than your brain, especially given this band came at a time when people couldn’t move as freely as they wished. After being pent up for so long, people were excited to let loose.”

Hughes should know. He was a fan of the band, at that point making a name for themselves with exhilarating shows across South London, before he was in the band. He managed to talk his way into the group by convincing them that he could play the viola.

He gave himself a week to master an instrument he had never played previously. “Joe said it was one of the worst pieces of rubbish he’d ever heard in his life,” Hughes recalls. He got the job. “This band is a matter of confidence over competence. Competence is over-rated in modern music.”

Those formative gigs formed the bedrock of what Fat Dog were all about, seizing the moment, drinking too much with the moment, going home separately from the moment but making up with the moment again the next day.

“When me and Johnny first joined, Joe was like, ‘All I want to do is make music that’ll make people’s heads blow up’,” says bassist Harris.

It didn’t take long for the diehards to come flocking, every Fat Dog show in the capital becoming a huge upgrade on the last. They sold out the Scala last October and have just done the same at the 1500-capacity Electric Brixton. There is something deeper going on here than the usual punter-goes-to-gig situation. Everyone is in on it.

“There’s a sense of community about Fat Dog,” says drummer Johnny Hutchinson.

“Our music says, ‘Listen to our noise’ but it also says ‘come and vibe with us’.”

Recently, the band completed an ecstatically received tour of the US that included an all-conquering set at a taco joint.

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Turning their attention to a full-length debut, Fat Dog wondered how best to capture the intoxicating joy of their live set until an otherworldly visit after a disastrous show in Bordeaux helped clarify their leader’s thinking.

With the words of an incandescent promoter ringing in his ears (“You are a [expletive deleted] joke!”), Love stood transfixed as a UFO landed right in front of him, slightly damaging the rear-side of a parked Renault Clio.

A message was beamed from the ship directly into Love’s mind, he claims.

“You are alien preachers,” the singer was told, “and you worship the big dog in the sky.”

Bingo. The spacecraft took off before the owner of the Renault Clio could take down their details.

It was with this information rolling around his head that Love set to work on what has become WOOF..

Now a man on a mission, Love fired himself up by remembering the time that he worked as a kitchen porter and someone asked to borrow some ‘baccy and took most of the pack. He thinks about that a lot. He was the angriest he’d ever been; so angry that he wrote the fierce, barbed-wire synth-punk of album opener Vigilante there and then.

Soon, a widescreen, ambitious un-pop pop album began to take shape. There were sessions with Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode producer James Ford, other sessions with Jimmy Robertson (The Last Dinner Party, Anna Calvi, Everything Everything, Late Of The Pier) and recording stints in Domino’s studio in South London.

“This album is our live set on steroids,” says Wallace.

Sometimes Love would get stressed as he worked on the record and feel his chest tightening, the singer alleviating the pressure by downing tools and taking shifts at the Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Norfolk. Love comes from a long line of turkey farmers.

It was during one such stint on the turkey farm that Wetherspoons supremo Tim Martin got in touch to say that he was a fan of the group’s sprawling debut single ‘King of the Slugs’, released last August.

While Love declined Mr Martin’s offer to help the band, he did write the lyrics to a key track from the album in the toilets of one of the businessman’s establishments.

“‘I am the King’ was written in the toilets of the Wetherspoons pub in Forest Hill,” says Love, thereby ensuring the pub will one day get a blue plaque. “It was after I got broken up with.”

The theme running through the rest of these tracks is confusion. And it is a visit into the mind of Joe Love.

“Music is so vanilla,” he says. “I don’t like sanitised music. Even this album is sanitised compared to what’s in my head.”

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