A BRITISH indie rock band have done the impossible and shocked Australia – after their lead singer stripped naked on stage.
The Fat White Family have been branded “drunken wired c***s” by Australians after the stunt by frontman Lias Kaci.
The band, from London, are performing at the Splendour in the Grass Festival alongside bands such as The Cure and The Strokes.
But Lias stole the headlines last Friday by spending 20 minutes on stage starkers apart from his shoes and socks.
Onlookers at the festival in North Byron, New South Wales, reported that Kaci was seen in conversation with Australian police after the event.
James Young, who was at the festival said: “It was 2.30pm on a Friday afternoon. Fat White Family were practically the first band on the whole 3 day festival.
“He got naked after only about 4 songs and remained so for 20 mins but it felt like an hour.
“The band ignored him. The crowd laughed. We know the band. We expect to be shocked.
“He left his shoes and socks on, which I thought was practical.
“It didn’t appear to be pre-meditated, he just wanted to grab people’s attention and make the early show memorable. They are loose units as we all know. It’s part of their appeal.”
Young, who owns a Melbourne bar where the band played on Monday night, said that he witnessed police talking to Kaci after the performance.
He said: “I was in the backstage area and I wanted to pop my head in to their van to say ‘hello’… and there were three cops standing in front of the lead singer and he had an ice pack against his broken nose.
“Pretty much everyone from the police, to the site organisers, to all the other bands wanted the drunken wired c***s out of there which is exactly what happened.”
The band posted on their Facebook stage last night (Tuesday) to explain the reason for the police involvement.
They wrote: “The police were only involved because a dear friend of ours was found, heaven forbid at a music festival, inebriated to the point of being asleep in our backstage room.
“There was nudity but what of it? If you take your clothes off at the Serpentine its performance art, if you do it on stage you’re a perverse, gimmicky shock merchant, this kind of s*** should be as bog standard a part of the vocabulary of alternative music as big muff guitar pedals and sonic youth t shirts by now, the idea of anybody finding it offensive is offensive, these people wish to inhabit the dullest of all possible worlds.”
Kaci later admitted that he was ejected by the police.
He claims that a friend of the band was intoxicated, which led to the festival’s organisers ringing the police, who escorted him away.
He said: “Eventually [one of my friends] got too drunk and he fell asleep and I put him in our backstage room, which was a little bit messy, like any backstage room five hours into a festival.
“[The Splendour organisers] told us that we all had to leave the festival then and there immediately under police escort because my friend was drunk.
“They took a disliking to us I think from the moment we walked in there.
“I think they took offence to the fact I took all my clothes off onstage. But I’m an artist, I’ll do whatever I want…they know what they’re booking when they hire the band. It’s something that I’ve done on multiple occasions.”
Fat White Family formed in London in 2011.
They released their second album, Songs for our Mothers, earlier this year.
This is by no means the first instance of a rockstar getting naked during a performance.
The late Doors singer Jim Morrison was charged with indecent exposure and simulating masturbation at a gig in Florida in 1969, although he denied the allegations.
Ex-Queens of the Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri has played naked on several occasions and was once arrested whilst playing at a festival in Rio de Janeiro.
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers also famously played with just socks on their genitals during their debut concert tour in 1983, in what later became known as their ‘socks on c***s’ routine.
