No Filter
His inner circle includes Donatella and Kate, in April he played a two-hour set live on Instagram for Victoria Beckham’s birthday and he’s now as popular on Instagram as he is on the decks. DJ Fat Tony, the unlikely cult hero of quarantine, talks to Scarlett Russell.
“The first time I went to play at Donate lla’s house in Milan, she said, ‘I’m so honoured you’re in my house.’ I thought, ‘Are you f***ing mental? Thirteen years ago I was sleeping rough, now I’m Djing at Donatella Versace’s house and flying first class to Miami to play the opening of a stadium.’”
Meet Tony Marnach, aka DJ Fat Tony, aka fashion’s favourite DJ and owner of one of the most popular Instagram accounts in lockdown.
Best friends with Boy George, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Elton John, Marnach, 54, has helmed the decks of the biggest clubs and best fashion shows during an illustrious 35-year career in dance music. His early days included gigs at the Palladium, New York, in the 1980s, Turnmills in London and many Soho clubs in the 1990s, plus shows for John Galliano, Lynne Franks, Katharine Hamnett and the like.
More recently, in his uniform of a Gucci T-shirt, he has played at fashion shows for Dior, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Victoria Beckham and “every season for Donatella”. He has Djed at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens (“They built me a revolving stage! In a cube!”) as well as at private parties for Harvey Nichols and Elton John.
“Kim Jones, Riccardo [Tisci] — I grew up with them, we all come from a clubbing background. If I need something to wear for a party, I’ll just ring them.” Last year he played at the Fashion Awards afterparty and Marc Jacobs’ wedding to former model Char Defrancesco. Christy Turlington, the Hadid sisters and Emily Ratajkowski were guests at that New York extravaganza.
“Everyone from fashion was there,” Marnach tells me. “It was so over the top. They had an 8ft wedding cake and, as a leaving gift, every guest got a [Marc Jacobs] wedding hoodie. I played them Luther Vandross’ Never Too Much.”
Back in London, Pimlico to be precise, Marnach has also garnered social-media status by providing cultural light relief from coronavirus.
His Insta feed @dj-fattony- — 118,000 followers and counting — is made up almost entirely of memes. (In terms of popularity these zeitgeisty images with text photoshopped across them are 2020’s answer to the selfie. “Memes are like Quality Street [chocolates],” he says, “they’re for sharing.”)
His are clever, camp and very funny: a stock picture of a doctor holding up a supermarket line as she scrambles for change with the caption, “I’m so sorry! Do you accept rounds of applause?” Another reads: “‘How was your weekend?’ ‘I watched everyone I hate make banana bread.’”
They are “liked” by everyone from Paris Hilton, Karen Elson and every London stylist you’ve heard of to ... Trisha Goddard? Yep, Marnach had lunch with the early noughties ITV daytime talk-show host, @therealtrishagoddard, in New York once, and now she regularly posts emojis underneath his rudest pictures. “She’s amazing!” he says, in a booming, gravelly South London voice.
Ispeak to Marnach via Zoom on a Friday afternoon: me in my basic North London flat, Marnach giving me a virtual tour of his colourful South London one. There is a framed print of Marilyn Monroe (“from Kate”) an “original Banksy” and a yellow poster that simply reads “Tosser”. He’s isolating with his partner of eight years, David, who works for British Airways, and their dog, Tailor. Phones buzz, the dog barks and a delivery of nonalcoholic beer arrives.
Marnach has been sober for 13 years, after nearly three decades of drug addiction that left him bankrupt in the late noughties. So you’re all green juices and yoga now, Tony? “F*** off!” he bellows with a grin. “I walk the dog, that’s my exercise. I eat unhealthily too. My counsellor suggested I do yin yoga.” He rolls his eyes dramatically.
His garden, decorated with pretty plants and strings of fairy lights, is where he has been on his decks recording virtual parties. In April he played a two-hour set for Victoria Beckham’s birthday there, which she posted on her Instagram Live, asking for donations to the Children’s Society. “I’ve known Victoria and David for years,” Marnach says. “I do all their parties. I did Brooklyn’s 21st, Harper and Cruz’s party at Christmas. When one brand wants you, they all want you.”
He doesn’t know how much they raised, but all the gigs he has played since lockdown have been for charity. He also recorded a self-filmed session for a virtual festival on the Youtube clubbing channel Glitterbox. It’s a glorious hour of euphoric house, including a remix of Club Tropicana “and dad dancing — it’s awful”, he cackles. It looks like he had the last laugh, though: that evening #Fattony is trending on Twitter. “How crazy is that?” he texts me.
I think back fondly to my late teenage years in the early noughties — Fridays at Fabric, Saturdays at Camden Palace — and my 20s spent in Soho, clubs in Ibiza and festivals in Barcelona; I wish I’d witnessed Fat Tony in his heyday.
“Crazy” is a fitting description of Marnach’s staggering ascent to fashion fame. He was born and raised in South London and his first gig, when he was 16, was at the Lyceum — then a club, now a theatre and home to The Lion King musical. Within a few years, house music arrived in London and the city’s nightlife was at a peak — Marnach became a fixture on the Soho circuit, playing at the members’ club Fred’s, where he met Kate Moss in the late 1980s. “She’d turn up after school and get so drunk on Long Island iced teas, I’d have to put her in the office to sleep it off.”
He recalls Naomi Campbell at “13 or 15, sitting on the steps outside [Boy] George’s house. She was a massive Culture Club fan!” Marnach helped Boy George get sober 12 years ago. “I’ve been best friends with him since I was 13,” he says. George is also responsible for the Fat Tony moniker. (Marnach weighed 114kg in his teens.) “I moved in with him and got him clean. I got lots of people clean, people we’ve talked about but I won’t name names.”
We’ve talked about Naomi and Kate, but I don’t like to ask — though Marnach does say later: “Kate’s been clean for over two years. Me and my sober mates now have a better time than we ever did when we used to drink and take drugs.”
His own troubles with addiction are well documented. He took cocaine with Freddie Mercury and such was his love of ketamine that he used to stop playing mid-track, shouting through the microphone: “No K, no play!” Revellers were quick to offer up their stash. “It was the 1980s, the 1990s,” he says. “Drugs were everywhere — everyone did them — and you could get away with anything because there was no social media.” He says he spent “over £1m on drugs. That’s a warning. I’m not bragging. I lost houses, I lost my sanity and I was bankrupt.” Friendships crumbled, as did relationships. His long-term boyfriend James helped him to get clean but the relationship didn’t last. He replaced drugs with sex for a while (“sleeping with up to eight blokes a day”, he has said), but is now monogamous and happy with David.
Talk about a comeback. In a world without quarantine, if you can imagine such a thing, he normally plays “two to three” gigs a week, including a weekly residency at Ministry of Sound and charges anything from “£1000 for mates to upwards of £8000 for corporate gigs. Sometimes I play in return for clothes, sometimes I play for nothing at all, which is a great place to be.”
He helps recovering addicts. “People reach out to me on social media every day asking about help for themselves or a family member and I respond to every single message I get.”
Last November he partnered with the Terrence Higgins Trust to speak out about the importance of National HIV Testing Week.
Fashion month is his busiest time, but he’s not worried about his income if the fashion weeks go online.
“They’ll still have parties.” And they’ll want him there. It’s no wonder everyone loves Marnach; he’s boisterous, affectionate and, much like his Instagram posts, has no filter.
“PC pisses me off,” he says. “But I only take the piss out of people who deserve it.” People like Donald Trump, Joe Exotic (if you know, you know) and rich people in general. He has a collection of 160,000 memes he has collected from various social media feeds over the years, posting anything that feels apt that day.
“When something pops into my head, I repost it. I get sent about 200 a day from people, but often they’re ones I’ve already posted. Keep up! I make my own ones too. Those have Fat Tony watermarks on them, they come out of my mental head. If I can make people’s lives better through music, through recovery or just through funny memes, then I’m a winner.”