Fat Dog: 'It’s making you feel it in your gut the moment you hear it'

“I was talking to the old synth player and I said, is there any instrument you need? He said, ‘We could do with a viola’. That night I went on eBay and ordered a viola, went to collect it the next day and gave myself a week to learn it, then when I took the audition I don’t think Joe could even look me in the eyes, but as it turns out I could also play some other instruments without lying about it and it just worked out. I think he liked the cut of my jib and my sheer arrogance that I didn’t learn the viola. He said, ‘We need that kind of confidence’.”

Hughes might regret suggesting in a previous interview that Fat Dog’s sound is not thinking music – “I think it’s going to bite me forever because it makes us sound like we’re cavemen,” he sighs – however he does feel that the high-octane dance music they produce is a riposte to the more cerebral approach of some of their contemporaries. “There’s a certain type of music that is auto-erotic where the people onstage are showing off, they’re basically doing the thing for themselves, and that’s all very impressive but it’s not making me feel anything; whereas I think Fat Dog is just sheer feeling. I think that’s what’s nice about us, it’s not necessarily a matter of it not being cerebral, because a lot of thought has gone into these songs, but it’s making you feel it in your gut the moment you hear it.”

Despite coming from technical background himself as musician, having played double bass in orchestras and big bands in his younger years, Hughes has also claimed – in punk rock fashion – that competence is “over-rated” in modern music. “It’s kind of a joke,” he explains today. “I’ve got some friends who have a Competence Movement because they think that people aren’t competent enough whereas I like taking the p*** out of that. The thing about Fat Dog is that we’re all basically playing the wrong instruments, it’s about being pragmatic. Every time that we’ve had to get maybe a jazz musician in, someone who’s straight out of uni, they’ve always had this arrogance about them but then they flop (with us).”

Having witnessed the band as a punter, Hughes already knew about about the strong sense of community that Fat Dog have engendered with their fans. “Going to a Fat Dog gig was crazy, it was the first time that I’d been to a gig where everyone immediately locked into the same wavelength when it came to what they were about to do,” he says. “It became a bit tribal, people started dancing and you could tell that people were all feeling it in their guts – the sense of community comes mainly from that, I think, but also for the longest time we didn’t release any music, so it was all word-of-mouth. It would be a bunch of people from Manchester or Leeds or some people from Sheffield talking to each other going, ‘We can stay in this hotel or we can stay at this guy’s house and go and see Fat Dog’. From quite an early stage it was fostering a sense of community in that way.

“Nowdays we’ve got this thing called The Kennel on the app Telegram, there’s 200 or 300 people in that group and they’re always talking to each other and organising around gigs that we’re doing.”

Hughes sees their album Woof as “in one sense” a distillation of their live set, saying that “we want to get them on record, so there is the element of the live show”, but in the studio they also revelled in the opportunity “to do things sonically that you maybe don’t have the chance to do live – or at least we don’t have the chance to do either financially or we just don’t have enough arms to do it”.

“I think what’s nice about the album is it’s very well polished, I’ll say that much. Joe, because he wrote the songs, obsessed over it like it was his child. It almost took exactly nine months, as though it was the birth of a child, to get this album done. By the end of it he was getting heart palpitations. It’s not the same as the live show because you can’t smell the audience in a studio, but I think we’ve managed to capture quite a lot of ​​​​​​​that live element in a nice way as well as added some stuff ​​​​​​​that we haven’t normally done live​​​​​​​, so that’s nice.”

If the song lyrics have an end-times feel, Hughes says that was intentional. “It’s sort of like walking with your eyes closed into the apocalypse not really understanding what’s going on, especially the songs that were written around the Covid times which was a pretty surreal time for everyone, it was very bizarre,” he says. “There’s an undercurrent of confusion throughout the album – I know Joe well enough to say that he often seemed confused – but also what I really liked is there is this element of the indomitable will of human beings. It’s quite motivational in a way, it’s almost like a life coach outpouring or something, some of the lyrics are trying to be really uplifting.”

Woof is out on Domino Records on Friday September 6. Fat Dog play an instore gig at Jumbo Records, Leeds on September 12 and are also at Float Along Festival in Sheffield on September 28, Project House, Leeds on November 10 and Crookes Social Club, Sheffield on November 14. https://fatdogfatdogfatdog.com/