The Flatliners' FAT debut The Great Awake turns 10!

This September, The Flatliners will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of their breakthrough album and FAT debut, The Great Awake. To commemorate the anniversary, we’ve pressed up a limited run of just 500 copies on a special color, as part of our unofficial “Fat Classics on Color” series. In addition, we have a new entry in the official Original Demos Series: The Flatliners’ The Great Awake Demos. The band unearthed three demos which vocalist/guitarist Chris Cresswell lays out below, along with the band’s story of getting signed to FAT. This 7" is strictly limited. The 500 color copies are only available in the below bundle, along with the album’s color repress. You can also order a black copy of the 7" by itself here.

Australia/New Zealand: Fat Webstore hosted by Artist First for Vinyl
Europe: Fat Webstore hosted by Kingsroad for Vinyl
USA & everywhere else: right here!

Chris Cresswell: "Our story with Fat Wreck Chords begins at the very end of the year 2006, when through some lovely people we got hooked up with Fat Mike’s email address, which is **********@********* . *

After hiring a group of top-notch professional musicians who were willing to work for nothing more than the bottom of an ashtray beer bottle and leftover Flats merch from a virtually unattended tour, we ended up with some great sounding demos. I mean these things were fucking mint. We then passed the songs along to Fat Mike under the ruse that it was indeed us on the recordings, and wouldn’t you know it, Mike loved them. Just loved them. He even told us he wanted to hear more!

Well, at this point we figured the was the jig was up. We were up shit’s creek for sure. The musicians we had hired had already skipped town, selling their Flatliners t-shirts at flea markets all around the world for top dollar (literally for $1 each), still sucking on those beer bottle cigarette butts just to get a buzz. After an admittedly mild but also group effort panic attack, we began to see this as an opportunity to make good on our promise, and—this time—send Fat Mike some songs that we indeed did ourselves.

Lucky for you, dear reader, what will, in some circles, go down as some of the shittiest recordings of our career, can now be heard in the comfort of your own home! The real upside though is in those tough-to-navigate musical moments, you can really hear us at our purest: sheer panic and complete confusion as to how we got there.

In the end, we were exonerated for our trickery and even rewarded for our courage, when Fat Mike told us of his desire to release these demos, along with the rest we sent him, as the actual Great Awake album. We begged and pleaded with him for an exorbitant amount of money to not only buy back our Flatliners t-shirts from the now burnt-out and career-hopping flea market queens and kingpins, but to also to record the album for real. And I think we all know how that turned out. Thanks a bunch Mike! I think we technically still owe you some money…"