All The Fat Children have been a Bengaluru band since 2008, and the one song of theirs that Spotify's Rock in India playlist keeps is I Can Fly: a 2013 single, two minutes and forty-eight seconds long, that frontman Eben Johnson says he wrote while running on a treadmill. At our 2:34 PM IST check on 16 October 2026 it sat at No. 93 of 100, exactly where it has been in every Rock in India snapshot this desk has saved since 13 October.

It isn't a glamorous slot, but the song says a lot about All The Fat Children, or ATFC as the press shortened them. It is a short, plain-spoken record by a trio that spent a decade telling interviewers it didn't believe in albums, and thirteen years on it is still the front door to a catalogue with only three rooms.

All The Fat Children at a glance

  • Band: All The Fat Children (ATFC), alternative rock trio from Bengaluru, formed in 2008 at Christ University
  • Line-up in press since 2013: Eben Johnson (guitar, vocals), Vickram Kiran (bass, vocals), Sachin Savio Dane (drums)
  • Rock in India song: I Can Fly, No. 93 at our 2:34 PM IST snapshot on 16 October 2026; 2:48
  • Release: I Can Fly – Single, dated 2013 on Spotify and Apple Music; ℗ 2013 All The Fat Children; Apple genre Alternative
  • Apple Music credits printed: All The Fat Children (Performer); Eben Johnson (Lyrics)
  • Official video: uploaded by Qyuki to YouTube on 17 October 2013, in its Bandstand series
  • Streaming catalogue at capture: three singles, I Can Fly (2013), Dumb Dumb (2016) and Somebody Else (dated 2024 on Apple)
  • Spotify at capture: 109 monthly listeners, 72 followers, 6,363 plays for I Can Fly

Fat rock, and a name chosen on purpose

Every profile gets to the name, so let's start there. "At one point, all of us weighed above 100 kilos," Johnson told The Hindu in 2015. Two years later he told Debarun Borthakur of The Times of India that the joke had an edge. "When we started off, sometime in 2008, we all were chubby kids. Most of our initial material came from the fact that we [were] overweight. I, personally, was very insecure about my body-shape." The name, he said, "probably was our way of going about it."

I find that more interesting than the gag. A band that names itself after the thing people tease you for has decided how loud it wants to be. ATFC called the sound fat rock, and Johnson's definition is the best on record: "It is very in-your-face music with low key, pulp-sounding distortion sounds. Hence the term fat rock."

The line-up has barely moved. Johnson met Vickram Kiran at Christ University; Sachin Savio Dane replaced the first drummer. Deccan Herald's March 2014 gig report lists the same three names on the same instruments, and in 2018 Johnson told The Hindu's Allan Moses Rodricks that they had had no line-up change "except for one drummer seven years ago." The college thread runs deep here. Thermal And A Quarter, at No. 1 on the same playlist today, began with Christ College musicians in 1996, a link we traced in our Bengaluru indie scene piece.

The treadmill song

The best account of where I Can Fly came from is in that 2017 interview. Johnson went to the UK "sometime around 2012" for a postgraduate course, and the band took a break. When he came back he "started working out like mad," going from about 130 kg to 71. "It was then that our music shifted gears and started leaning more towards positivity," he said, and that was when he wrote I Can Fly, while running on a treadmill for half an hour a day.

Set that story beside the record and it fits almost too neatly. I Can Fly is the second-shortest song on Rock in India. Only Tanusri and UNPLG'd's Zinda, at 1:29, is shorter, and the playlist's median length at our snapshot was 4:50. Somebody Else, the single Rolling Stone India picked among 2015's best, runs 4:55. A song written on a treadmill and kept to a runner's length is not an accident I want to explain away. It gets in, says its piece and gets out.

The paper around it is thin. Spotify and Apple both carry ℗ 2013 All The Fat Children, so the master is self-held. Apple prints two credit rows: the band as Performer and Eben Johnson for Lyrics. The YouTube upload is fuller. Qyuki's description for the official video lists Ankit Suryakanth as music producer, Islahuddin NS as director, and the three members on guitar, bass and drums. None of that reached the store sheet. As we have argued about who owns Indian indie masters, a credit panel only shows what someone chose to type in, and here a producer named in public on the video is missing from the page the playlist points to.

A band built on singles, with three of them online

ATFC were refusing the album long before streaming made it fashionable. "We're not interested in an album but keener on single releases, maybe five to six songs on EP," Johnson told The Hindu in February 2013. By December 2015 he had sharpened it: "We have never supported the idea of an album. I have personally bought only two albums in my life. I never saw the point in it."

The singles earned notice. The Hindu covered Somebody Else in December 2015 as the band's new single, with a self-funded video shot in 24 hours in a Kammanahalli godown painted white. Rolling Stone India put it in its 10 Best Indian Singles of 2015 for its "fat, heavy beats and some good bass, plus some cool Malayalam bits." Then, in February 2018, Johnson told The Hindu an album was finally on the way, to be "released in three phases – Side A, B and C."

You won't find it on Spotify or Apple Music. The catalogue at our capture is three singles: I Can Fly, Dumb Dumb (℗ 2016) and Somebody Else, which Apple dates to 3 August 2024 with a ℗ 2024 line, nearly nine years after The Hindu covered it as new. Songs Deccan Herald heard in a 90-minute Hard Rock Cafe set in 2014, among them My Favourite Heartbreaker, Shut Up And Dance, Love Child and Simplify, do not appear under the band's name on either service, though the band's own Spotify bio still mentions some of them. A singles-only plan made sense in a world of YouTube premieres and club gigs. On a streaming playlist it means the listener who likes No. 93 has almost nowhere to go next.

What Rock in India is doing at No. 93

I think the curators picked the right song. I Can Fly is the record from the moment the band turned, in Johnson's telling, towards positivity, and unlike so many songs on this playlist it doesn't ask for five minutes of your patience. Its neighbours are Claver Menezes's RUSTLER at No. 92 and Arrows's Buried to Dust, with Siddharth Basrur, at No. 94.

What the slot is not doing is moving many people. A song that has held No. 93 since at least 13 October shows 6,363 plays on the band's Spotify page, and the profile shows 109 monthly listeners. Public data can't tell me how long it has been on the list or how many of those plays came from it. It can tell me that No. 93 of 100 is a long scroll down on a shelf whose songs, as our song-length study found, mostly run long.

Where I'm less sure

I don't know what All The Fat Children are doing in 2026. The most recent interview I could verify is the 2018 Hindu piece, in which Johnson described the band as "at the crossroads between thinking of another career and life choices like getting married." The re-dated Somebody Else on Apple suggests someone has tended the catalogue since, but that is a metadata trail, not a statement of plans.

There is also a question the band raised itself. "Singing in English is a challenge, because at the end of the day, that's not what a majority of listeners in India would listen to," Johnson told Deccan Chronicle's Pooja Prabhan in 2017. Of the Rock in India songs we could tag by language this morning, 57 were Hindi and 20 English, as our piece on Indian indie languages showed. An English song from 2013 holding a slot there is a credit to the curators' memory, and a reminder that this English-singing trio never got the catalogue its live reputation promised.

What this publication thinks

I Can Fly earns its place. It is a small, honest record from a band that turned body-shaming into a name and a sound, and the story Johnson told about writing it, mid-run and partway through losing almost sixty kilos, gives it a weight its 2:48 doesn't advertise. What lets it down is everything around it: a store sheet that drops the producer, a catalogue of three singles, and an album announced in 2018 that never reached a streaming service.

If the playlist brought you here, play I Can Fly, then Somebody Else, then open the Qyuki video and read the credits under it. And if those Side A, B and C songs still exist on a hard drive somewhere in Bengaluru, there has rarely been a better moment to put them out.

FAQ

Who are All The Fat Children?

All The Fat Children (ATFC) are an alternative rock trio from Bengaluru, formed in 2008 at Christ University. Press coverage from 2013 onwards lists Eben Johnson on guitar and vocals, Vickram Kiran on bass and vocals, and Sachin Savio Dane on drums. They call their sound fat rock.

Which All The Fat Children song is on Rock in India?

I Can Fly, at No. 93 of 100 at our 2:34 PM IST snapshot on 16 October 2026. It has been at No. 93 in every Rock in India snapshot we have saved since 13 October 2026.

When was I Can Fly released?

Spotify and Apple Music date the single to 2013, with ℗ 2013 All The Fat Children. The official video was uploaded to Qyuki's YouTube channel on 17 October 2013.

Who wrote I Can Fly?

Apple Music credits Eben Johnson for lyrics and the band as performer. Johnson told The Times of India in 2017 that he wrote the song while running on a treadmill after returning from the UK. The 2013 video credits Ankit Suryakanth as music producer.

Do All The Fat Children have an album?

No album appears under the band's name on Spotify or Apple Music. Their streaming catalogue at our capture was three singles: I Can Fly, Dumb Dumb and Somebody Else. In 2018 Eben Johnson told The Hindu an album was planned in three phases, but none has appeared on those services.

Sources

Cover: All The Fat Children, official artist photo as displayed on the band's Spotify artist profile (photographer not credited there); shown in full and centred on a matching light field at 1200×630 by discography.in. Source: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4JhgzR1LNZYJSXje04ZEjc.

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