Track By Tracks: Fat Bastard – Barely Dressed (2025)

Hi! Jorn here, the singer of Fat Bastard. Before we start plowing through our songs, let me clarify what we as a band want to convey through our music. We usually don’t make grand gestures or comment on political situations or societal issues. Sometimes, music is just about forgetting all that shit and having a good time. Most of our songs lean into that—they’re about cars, girls, and beer, baby! But sometimes, they’re not…

Never Told Me Her Name is about a wild night with a girl who vanishes when the protagonist wakes up, never telling him her name. It was originally called “Hole in the Wall” and was about the wall between the US and Mexico. Yes, it was written during the first Trump reign (that long ago, LOL). When preproducing our record in 2023, he was “long gone” from the Oval Office, so we decided to change the lyrics. Little did we know…

The music for You Know You Are Gone was written by Ira Black, a legend in rock music (you may know him from Bulletboys, Vio-Lence, Dio Disciples, Lizzy Borden, Dokken, Metal Church, …). Ira, a good friend of the band, produced the album and did the mixing and mastering. When we were going back and forth about the songs we preproduced, he said: “Hey guys, I wrote something that I feel would be perfect for you.”

Hammer is an homage to a close personal friend known in the Flemish rock community as “The Hammerguy.” Jan Daneels roamed around all loud festivals, armed with his wife Inge and an inflatable hammer, diving into every pit while hitting everyone in the head with said hammer. He was a gentle giant, always ready to help out. But—as it turned out—wasn’t able to help himself with the demons in his own head. Jan decided to opt out of life in May 2022, and we still miss him dearly. At the Alcatraz festival in Belgium in 2022, we paid tribute to him during our show. 250 inflatable hammers were thrown into the crowd, and to this day, people still bring those hammers to Fat Bastard shows. He’ll never be forgotten!

Going Crazy… I always wanted to write a song with an on-the-nose double entendre; it’s a kind of humor that is used way too much with Fat Bastard. So you guys decide: is this a song about an old rust bucket of a car that you desperately want to work, or a song about erection trouble with a woman you’ve desired all your life? Piece of Shit is about being betrayed by someone you trusted completely. When realizing that trust was misplaced after years of friendship, the pain can be so immense that you want to scream bad shit at that person. This song vocalizes that anger.

Come Out and Play is a bit of a weird song compared to the others on the album, stylistically. For me personally, it’s a bit more glam rock than what we tend to do, but hey, it sounds great and was—literally—written in 15 minutes. So no big thinking, just GO!

Tiger Queen’s lyrics are largely inspired by Motörhead’s Love Me Like a Reptile and Amörtisseur’s Slangesex (translates loosely as “sex with snakes”). Amörtisseur plays Motörhead songs with lyrics translated to the Antwerp dialect, and I really loved their version of the Motörhead song. The music to our song immediately told me that the lyrics had to go in that direction… But as a tiger is a way cooler visual as a logo than a snake, we went that way!

We Are the (Over)Killers: you only need to listen to our music for a minute to know that we’re heavily inspired by Motörhead. When we wrote Killers, our drummer Kurt immediately took his cue from Motörhead’s Overkiller for the end-and-repeat section of the song!

Mister Rock is an homage to Leather-clad Jesus of the Whory Church of Motörhead. He’s the Pope that should be. ‘Nuff said!

And then the last song of the album, Kill My Soul. It’s a song with so many layers and elements to shine a light on. This is—by far—the most personal song we’ve created, as it dives into the deeply personal experiences of one of our band members, who was abused as a child. The scars are bravely hidden in everyday life, but they are still there as he copes with the aftermath.

When researching child abuse, I was baffled by the sheer number of cases that are registered: in 2022 in Belgium alone, over 10,000 cases. Horrible. Knowing that the registered cases are a mere fraction of the actual abuse going on, we hope to raise awareness of this topic.

Then there is the duality in the atmosphere of the song: the lyrics are a pitch-black remembrance of the situations he went through, but in stark contrast to the lyrics, we used an upbeat, happy musical setting. This is a comment on society in the sense that if we are to believe social media, everybody’s life is just great and peachy, while in reality, there are so many raw sides to our picture-perfect society. To further our society, we’d better live life in reality than behind an Instagram filter.