Premiere: All The Fat Children Crack Wise on ‘Dumb Dumb’

At all the college shows they’ve played in their eight years together, Bengaluru “fat” rock band All The Fat Children have taken a dig at the same future engineers who made their audience. Bassist Vickram Kiran says about their song “Dumb Dumb,” which releases this month with a music video, “We wrote it keeping in mind our engineering friends who always had their heads buried in their textbooks.”

“Dumb Dumb” was written in 2009, but follows up their last single “Somebody Else,” which released in 2015. The single, which also doubles up as a drinking song, works within the band’s fun and freewheeling hard rock sound, changing up tempos between the verses and chorus as vocalist-guitarist Eben Johnson sings on about just how many IQ points any engineering student can drop by the time they graduate and get a high-paying job. While a cross-dressing, bindi-spotted Johnson is always a stage draw at their shows, the leather jacket-clad bassist Kiran gets a chance to shine with his own beatboxing section on the song. The bassist says, “I just picked it up watching [Bengaluru-based beatboxer] Vineeth Vincent. It’s a nice added touch to the song and we wouldn’t really want to rely on a backing track.”

The band, who have been releasing singles since 2013’s “I Can Fly” are firmly anti-album. Kiran says, “Financially, a single has way more impact than an album. You have more control with it, with things like the video.” The band set up their gear at Bengaluru club venue The Humming Tree ”“ not on the stage, but in the men’s washroom. “The stage was a conventional choice, but we noticed the men’s loo is very spacious,” says Kiran, without a hint of a laugh. Johnson adds that they even shot takes in the women’s washroom, which he says his female friends find scandalous. In the video directed by Bengaluru production house Papercats, the band rocks out with a handful of fans in tow as well, while a parallel story features a disgruntled techie [played by alt rock band Mad Orange Fireworks’ frontman Michael Antony Dias] finally working up the courage to call it quits in style. Kiran adds, “Thank god they [The Humming Tree] scrubbed the place. It felt really cool.”