Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure

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There are some ridiculous levels of drug consumption that are occasionally hard to believe and it does become quite dark but there is always a funny scene/anecdote not far away. It is concerned with the travails of the art-rock provocateurs Fat White Family, whose tales of poverty, addiction, mental illness, and the drudgery of touring might be completely off-putting on the page if they weren’t written in such a bleakly hilarious way by author Adelle Stripe and Lias Saoudi (the latter the singer with the aforementioned band). Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

There is also a tribute to sometime band guitarist Dale Barclay, who died of an unrelated brain cancer, which is beautifully written and moving as Lias helplessly watches his friend struggle with a serious illness. This no holds barred, raw account of the rise and fall of one of the best indie rock bands this century and is destined to become a classic rock 'bio' (of sorts).

What is really refreshing about Ten Thousand Apologies is that it spares no one, nor attempts like most rock biogs to justify the (very) regular highs and depressing lows.

It’s impossible to mythologise a band when they fit into a cascade of differing rock legends in the very same chapter. The first is that none of the 25 musicians who passed through their ranks in a remarkably short space of time died directly from the industrial amount of Class A’s they managed to score and absorb via virtually every orifice.

Like a tragicomic penny dreadful dreamed up by a mutant hybrid of Jean Genet, the Dadaists and Mark E.