Musicians are no longer rebels... they are company men
Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ Huey Morgan is as outspoken as ever, railing against the music industry and the dangers of living in the inner-city, finds ALEX GREEN
FUN Lovin’ Criminals are entering a new phase of their 25-year career. Family, middle-age and a deep disillusionment with the music industry deterred them from making another record. Now they return with one completed album and another in the works.
The band’s parties, their fights and their unruly relationship with the music industry have mellowed in the 22 years since rollicking debut, Come Find Yourself.
But you wouldn’t know it by speaking to Huey Morgan – the pioneering rap-rock band’s haphazard and charismatic firebrand frontman.
If anything, it’s the opposite. Railing against the establishment down the phone in his inimitable New York drawl, Huey, now 50, is filled with fire.
“Nowadays, a band like mine couldn’t have gotten an eight record deal at EMI,” he explains, talking at 100 miles an hour.
“It just wouldn’t happen. There’s no artist development on the label side because they’re not making that kind of money to be able to afford to do that.
“A lot of the time I think music nowadays is so narrow because it has to hit on so many levels.
“It takes the adventure out of music and a lot of the fun – creativity as well.”
Huey wears his half Puerto Rican-American and half IrishAmerican heritage with pride and strikes an energetic, almost cartoonish, character on and off stage.
His band find themselves entering a new and exciting phase, one inspired by an album they made nearly 20 years ago when, exhausted from touring their 1998 sophomore record, 100% Colombian, the band retreated to Hawaii ato record a follow-up.
They settled on a covers album dubbed Mimosa after the champagne-orange juice cocktail.
“Fast forward 20 years, we got asked by Sony to do an all-original album,” Huey explains.
“We figured we couldn’t just jump in feet first. We figured we might want to test the waters as producers, you know?”
And that’s what they did. The result? Another album of covers, aptly entitled Another Mimosa.
Hell-raiser Huey contemplates the decade since their last album, Classic Fantastic – a critical flop that was quickly forgotten and pushed under the carpet.
“Ten years ago, frankly, we were trying to figure out, like, why we are even making a record?
“It had got to a point where the music business was so fragmented that it didn’t make any sense for us to make one, even though we did because we felt we had to.”
The resulting album, he admits, “wasn’t the greatest record we’ve ever done by a stretch”.
He also admits that earning a “bunch of money and selling millions of records”, as they did, could “soften you up”.
A veteran of the hip hop scene, Huey sees a musical landscape changed beyond recognition from his 90s heyday.
Mostly, he puts this down to the pervasive influence of the internet and social media.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the never-ending “beefs” between artists from across the rap spectrum.
Huey thinks the internet has taken the fire out of these scraps.
“I remember back in the day if there was a spat you would see somebody at a festival and y’all would throw hands.
“You can’t do that now because everybody’s got a camera phone and the internet is just waiting to correct any type of bugged out, crazy behaviour.”
Musicians, he says, are no longer “compelled to be rebels”.
Instead they are “company men” who “toe the line and make the money and shut up”.
Unsurprisingly, he’s no fan of today’s pop stars, who pillage the cream of every genre to create a hybrid that appeals to the masses.
“Everything is super contrived so it’s really hard for anyone to really like a musician because deep down it’s all smoke and mirrors,” he says.
“There are bands out there that are doing good for themselves but they’re very few and far between...”
Among the myriad surprising facts about Huey, maybe the oddest is that he lives in Bath, Somerset, with his interior designer wife, Rebecca – a world away from his native New York.
A few years ago Huey abandoned his adoptive home of London for a Georgian pile where he could focus on raising his son.
Importantly, he’s keeping him away from London – away from the capital where “kids stab other kids”. “London sucks man,” he laments. “London, for me, is everything a city shouldn’t be.
“It’s a bunch of people from diverse backgrounds who don’t like each other, who don’t want to get along, and have these little enclaves.”
He admits he would find raising children in London “too nervewracking,” then adds: “I live in Bath because frankly it’s a lot nicer.”
As the conversation draws to a close, Huey signs off in his inimitable style, explaining why he continues to write, record and play music.
He says: “If you love somebody you want to make them aware of s**t they might not be aware of – that’s what love is man. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
He adds: “But I’m not like Bono – I’m not going to try and jam it down their throat.”