Uncle Daddy is a new three-way collaboration project aiming to push musical boundaries. Nathan Saoudi (Fat White Family / Brian Destiny) Richard Wilson (Permeo / Rognvald ), and Joseph Pancucci (White Devil Disco / Fat White Family) have released just one demo track to date, and I spoke to the trio over zoom to learn more about Alabama 3‘s Larry Love role in bringing them together, their creativity, the surprisingly influence of Alex Ferguson and their ethos looking forward.
How did the three of you come together to form Uncle Daddy?
Rich: I moved to London maybe three years ago from Glasgow. I was there for five years working on really just learning how to make more kind of pop music style stuff, because I used to just do electronic, jungle and club music. And then I was starting to get into writing songs but there isn’t much happening there. And so eventually I moved into the middle of London to try and basically start something like this, I guess, or at least find something to do.
Nathan: And we met through a friend of ours who I used to play with, Sam Fez who runs Love Love Records. He introduced us to Rich, then I moved in with Rich and we were working together on a band he’s (Joseph) in called White Devil Disco.
Joe: Me and Nathan were in Fat White Family together as well.
Nathan: So we ended up gravitating towards working with Rich. He wasn’t with any musicians that we could see. And we slowly started working together.
Rich: I would always be doing electronic sound design kind of stuff, whereas they were always playing music and recording more like analogue style. And now we’ve joined a bit of that together, I guess.
Nathan: Rock world and electronic world, kind of coalescing, coming together, and this is the product of it. In this country, there is a strong electronic world, and a strong band world, but the two don’t really ever go together. Think this is what is happening from them, two worlds coming together. This is a truly collaborative trio, a holy trinity, or maybe an unholy trinity!
You must be absolutely delighted.
Nathan: I think people will see there is a more fluid and direct way to make music in this day and age, I hope so anyway.
Rich: It is a hard thing to come together, we’re basically working harder on just keeping ourselves together than the music at the moment. The music seems to come quite easy, but everything else, like just your general life to cope with trying to do what we’re doing at the same time. That’s more difficult than any recording, any music, any process, you know.
Do you mean in terms of just the logistics of the three of you getting together?
Rich: Everyone’s relationships, backgrounds, the way we’ve grown up and now we’re all together, trying to do something we all believe in. At the same time, you’re growing up, you’re going through your personal life.
Joe: Me and Nathan have quit drink for two months now. Rich has inspired that, because he’s never drunk. We kind of had to do it because this is serious.
Nathan: This is serious business. And if you want to be taken seriously, you’ve got to take yourself seriously. That’s what we’re doing.
Joe: We’re not doing it to get fucked up and pretend to be rock and roll stars. I actually want to make like, that’s what gets us off.
Rich: That’s part of our thing, where we have a directive. There’s too many people on stage that are on drugs just to be in a band. So they’re putting this message across to kids that want to do inspired by them, that, Oh, I need to be on drugs to be on stage, and what the drugs does is just defeat you. That’s the end. You’re not going to develop. You’re not going to grow as an artist. You’ll only stay at the same point or go down.
Joe: A lot of people are like, taking loads of drugs to kind of replicate like Lou Reed or fucking beat generation people, whoever. But they’re not actually coming out with any good material with, like, at the same time. So looking back at these people, oh, we need to get fucked up to make good stuff. But they’re not actually making good stuff.
Nathan: Margins are tight so if you can’t control yourself now, be prepared to be controlled by someone else.
You’ve released a track ‘Blood’ as an introduction to Uncle Daddy.
Joe: It’s just a demo we’re teasing with! We put it up on SoundCloud, but not everyone uses SoundCloud so we put it up on YouTube. But yeah the vocals have got to be redone. It’s missing some guitar. It’s got to be mixed. It’s got to be mastered. It’s not brilliant.
Nathan: We’ll keep being as generous as we possibly can before we’re actually damaging ourselves.
Now I’m really intrigued. So will there be a proper single release soon?
Nathan: We’ve got right now, as it stands, close to 12 songs, written and yeah, they’re not complete. But if someone’s to put a gun to our heads and say, “We’re releasing this now” we’d be like “alright”.
Rich: You have to come and see the show first, really for a while before going to listen to our music over and over again. It’s going to be more of an experience when you see us performing the songs than it is just listening to them on a CD or whatever. A track, like ‘Blood’ , we recorded that in the studio, and then we went and we rehearsed it live. So now it’s changed a bit, so we will re-record them in a more “live” style.
You were playing a gig on Saturday (5 October, All is Joy, 75 Dean Street, Soho). How did that go?
Rich: Really well. We had Larry Love there from Alabama 3 and we did four of his songs that we’ve made together, amongst our, what was it 12 or 13 in total.
Joe: And a couple of people we thought we’d have, we didn’t have and setting up a whole sound system and two sound systems, actually.
Nathan: Yeah, It was ambitious, but we’re doing everything ourselves. As far as failures go its the most successful one I’ve ever had. Basically, they wanted to see if we could have if we were responsible enough to look after this venue another time, and they’ve given us the green light. So there’ll be another show in Soho in a month.
Joe: We learnt a lot doing that night that we can do next time.
Rich: And Nathan has his Brian Destiny solo thing. Joe has his White Devil Disco thing, and I have my Rognvald thing, yeah. So sometimes we’ll do these things, maybe between our shows.
Nathan: If you listen to Rognvald and White Devil Disco and Brian Destiny it’s like a little kind of a genealogy. You know, those shops, where you don’t get food delivered, but they deliver the ingredients, and then you have to cook it yourself.
And on top of all of this you have a label?
Nathan: Dash the Henge Label. That’s a right struggle but we’re still going. They’ve started a shop. There’s live music in that place all the time, and it’s fun. We’re just trying to break into, I don’t know, like a post-Covid era where things seem to change slightly. We’re trying to work inside that new zeitgeist, or whatever.
Rich: The labels and the publishing from what I see in Britain is stuck 20 years ago, and they’re still selling and repeating that these things that they feel safe, they know that this worked in this time, this worked in that time, and they’re just kind of finding people again that want to be in a band. They’re not writing the songs together in some way. And that’s the people that are in the market, and the people making money. So it’s like, we want to change that. It’s like, bring it in the future. We’re almost in 2025 yet they’re selling music from 20 years ago and trying to create bands that look like bands from 20 years. That isn’t the kids doing that, that’s these peers with the money going “Here you do this“, you know, and the kids aren’t even really making that much money. They end up getting them hooked on drugs so that then they don’t spend lots of money, and they quit, and then they own their name, and their publishing. This is a British game that’s happening here for a long time.
Nathan: I’m a living embodiment of what he just said, by the way. My band, Fat White Family was way more lucrative when we were truly independent. When we signed a big deal, it could have went well, but the amount of new loopholes that you’ve got, you know. Trying to figure out when you’re young doesn’t make sense. You make less money. It’s really, really hard to utilize the labels. There is a way for them to work, but right now I just don’t see the point in it with this kind of music.
Is this really why you’re trying to set up your own?
Nathan: Yeah, because I’ve experienced it firsthand and for certain styles of music and ideas and people, emotions. I don’t know, it’s not healthy. Can be make you go mad, but for other people are willing to like, I don’t know, are maybe less passionate, it could maybe work.
Rich: You’ll get the odd person with money who has a heart of gold, and they’ll help you invest. But otherwise, you’re surrounded by snakes.
Nathan: It just doesn’t have to be that way. Right now there are snakes, but they could be snakes that are actually doing something, there could be music coming out, and then you’re happy to give them 50%. But they’re not doing it. It’s time for some form of change, isn’t it?
You’ve got 12 or 13 songs? What is your creation process? Between you you have these different backgrounds and music. How do you gel all that together?
Rich: Generally one of us pulls up something we’ve started, or an idea that we kind of know will fit us, and it’s cool. We kind of go with that, whether it’s like, I’ll make some backing music, or they have some chords, or they already have had, maybe something they’ve written but never used. We pull it out with the right beats, or the right sounds. Or sometimes we start a whole song.
Joe: Yeah, Rich can knock a song out in an evening and we’ll just jump on the vocals and see what we come out with, and, sort it out from there, put the guitar on it.
Rich: And then sometimes we will then just delete all the vocals, pitch the whole song up or down, and then rewrite it and do the whole thing again.
Nathan: And then sometimes we’ll just watch the football! I write most of my songs when watching football. Football and music’s the same thing.
Rich: Nathan is doing a lot of the writing, the words.
Nathan: It’s not words it’s football!
Rich: We all generally have the same kind of message to put across, which is the bigger the bigger picture.
Nathan: It’s like what Alex Ferguson said. No one’s bigger than the sum of the parts, you know. There is a bit of Alex Ferguson in this team. We want to be tested, and we want to challenge others. And that’s where the good chemistry happens. So right now, we’re not looking to dance among ourselves. We’re looking to start dancing with other people, because we already know we can dance ourselves. Jap Staam, Scholes, Van Nistelroy, Schmeichel. That’s what fucking Alex Ferguson got into his team, and they’re the best football team ever, even if you don’t know football, you know who Alex Ferguson is.
Joe: I don’t know who Alex Ferguson is.
Nathan: He doesn’t know who Alex Ferguson is, and he has got Alex Ferguson pumping through him right now.
What are the immediate plans? Do you have any more gigs lined up?
Joseph: We’ve got a few coming up. We’re going to book some more London shows in.
Nathan: Try and play as many gigs, try and make as many people happy as possible, and try and build a good fan base, and find other bands we can play with who we’re into. Just have fun.
Rich: I would like to work with helping other bands come up. Yeah, that’s a part of Uncle Daddy as well. It’s more to do their character as individuals than their music. Their music attracts us, and then we check the people out.
You’ve already mentioned an album.
Rich: We’ll always have music evolving, coming out, evolving. It’s not going to be stagnant, of like, we just have like, 12 songs.
Nathan: Also we should mention we’ve got half an album written with Larry Love (Alabama 3) which should be 2025.
Rich: Larry Love is part of the reason why we all got together. He started coming to my studio, and we were recording and getting to know him, and recording his songs. And that’s at the same time where we met. I would be recording some of Joe’s songs for his band. I was helping Nathan with some of his and then we were started doing Larry together, yeah. And then I was dropping these instrumental beats, and we started writing on them in between doing Larry’s stuff. Without Larry, I think it probably wouldn’t have been so quick coming together.
Nathan: I bumped into Larry coming out of the tube. And he was with his fiance at a time who he was now married to, and he’s “we just got engaged“, and I’m like, “Whoa, wicked”. And he got me pissed on cocktails, and I was just talking to him about him. He is the fucking dogs bollocks and Larry Love was there three days later “What’s going on here then?.”
Rich: He was like: “Mash me up. Make me murky.” You know, all this grime kind of stuff, all this new drill, he wanted to have a bit of that sound. He’s not scared of evolving into the future, so it helped us, everyone relax more about what we’re doing. That’s why we originally started, it was making an album for him, and then we evolved from that.
