THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
It was a Zoom call, but we were sharing the same sunny skies – Huey Morgan was at his home in Bath, southwest England, and The American’s base is just 30 miles away. He’s been busy doing various projects, but not playing live or recording new music. Until now. It’s good to have him back on the scene!
Well thanks, it's really nice for people to ask me questions again! It's been a couple years.
A lot of Americans that we interview are in the States, planning to come over here. You live here permanently, but you come from New York City. From Puerto Rican and Irish roots, is that right?
It is. Lower East Side of Manhattan, Avenue C and Sixth Street.
Those are both very musical cultures. Was it a very musical household?
My mother's not particularly musical herself, but she had a lot of records. I've asked her how she had them: “Because my friends would give me records, I never listened to them, but they gave them to me”. She had Willie Colón records and Louis Armstrong records and Ray Charles records and Rolling Stones records. I assumed that my mom was the coolest chick ever, but it turns out she just had really cool friends. Funny enough, I remember when I was about 12 or 13 I was walking with my mother in Union Square and Andy Warhol walks out of this office building to get into this limousine. My mom sees him and goes, “Hey, Andy”, and I'm like, What's my mom talking to Andy Warhol for? He looks at my mom and goes, “Hey, Janet”. They knew each other. Apparently she knew all these cool people. Didn't tell me a damn thing!
So it turns out you did have the coolest mom.
It turns out I did!
All those records that you're talking about, that's all roots music.
It’s all folk music. It's all essentially blues music, but with different parochial attitudes towards sonics, you know? I used to live in Ireland, and when I’d travel around I’d find a lot of music very similar to a lot of folk music you'd find in different villages in Puerto Rico.
Louis Armstrong said ‘all music is folk music’.
Yeah. He also said some other good things! There's two kinds of music, good music and bad music.
I wanted to ask about you joining the US Marines. You were given a choice, I think, between going to jail or the armed forces? The same thing happened to a friend of mine from Detroit in the 1980s, actually.
In my case it was the ‘80s as well. It straightened a lot of dudes out, man. I know three other dudes that this happened to, from different walks of life. We weren't 'full criminal', you know what I mean? The judge knew that they caught you right before you turned turn full criminal. And for me, it saved my life in a lot of ways.
My friend had been going into bars in Detroit and betting people that his Chevy was faster than their Mustang or whatever, illegal drag racing was his day job. The judge gave him that option and he joined the US Air Force, he did his three years, then he left because he joined a rock band.
You hear a lot of stories about bands that formed in the ‘70s and the ‘80s in the UK with American dudes in the Air Force and the Army, because there were a lot of bases over here during the Cold War.
So you chose the Marines?
Well it was kind of chosen for me. The judge and my lawyer were both former Marines, and they were like, we’re gonna straighten this kid out, he’s going to go to Parris Island [the US Marine Corps recruit training depot]. They knew that 13 weeks on Parris Island would straighten anybody out!
How long were you in the Marines?
I did my full hitch, my full four. I hurt my legs, so I got out on a medical. As you see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's like you forget the time that you were in the service. Then when you get out, you reflect on your time in the service more than you did when you were in it. I was young when I went in, so when I got out, I was ready to get out. It was a life interrupted in a lot of ways. Going into the service I found a sense of family, a sense of brotherhood, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. But when I realized I was on my way out, I was like, this is amazing, I can be a musician again. It propelled me, and having the discipline of being a Marine also supported me through my endeavors being a musician. Once the Marine, always the Marine!
I’m telling a lot of that story in my new book I'm releasing in September. I guess you'd call it an abbreviated memoir, it's as I remember it, which is foggy as hell. It takes place when I got out of the Marines and I was homeless, trying to work myself into becoming a musician. It ends a couple years later, after the band takes off.
I guess the band, Fun Lovin‘ Criminals, is what most people would first know you for?
Yeah, so the book leaves off where everybody picks up.
Did you set the band up in the States?
Yes, I was working at some nightclubs in New York, and I found a dude [Brian ‘Fast’ Leiser], he and I became really good friends, and we made music together for a bunch of years.
You had a very identifiable sound.
Being a little bit older than everybody else in the group, I was thinking about how to do something that was going to be different. Around that time, no one was amalgamating all these different genres together. It was either one or two styles. What we did was kind of different. I was surprised that we got our deal as quickly as we did.
Your music includes rock, Latin music, hip hop, rap, jazz, reggae, funk, samples... It sounds like you're walking around New York City, listening to the music coming out of all the open windows.
That's exactly the idea behind Fun Lovin‘ Criminals! You could go from street to street, block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, and you'd hear these great stories, but they'd be wrapped in these different sounds. And stories translate. It doesn't matter what sound they're wrapped in, if it's done thoughtfully it can make the story that much better. That's what we tried to do, bringing all those diverse New York City elements into it.
It's a very New York thing, like Blondie having the first No. 1 hit record with a rap on it - the first time a lot of people ever heard a rap was through a white punk group, who referenced Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash.
That record was great, because we all knew Fab 5 Freddy. We didn't know who Blondie was! And a lot of other people heard rapping first from the Beastie Boys. I'm old enough, and I come from the right neighborhood, to remember those guys as a punk group, with Kate Schellenbach [later in Luscious Jackson - ed] playing drums. That's how they started.
Would you say Fun Lovin' Criminals had more success in the UK than the US?
Oh, yeah, initially. I think our pragmatism was a big part of that. Initially we were signed to EMI North America. When they started hearing the music we were making a lot of people at EMI’s parent company in the UK liked it, then people over in their European labels liked it. To be honest, we weren't getting a bunch of love from the American market. At that point they were still very genre specific on the radio stations, and the radio stations informed the music the A&R people thought was good or bad. It was all about how commercially viable it was. So we started playing over there in the UK and Europe, and people started getting the idea. At the same time that we were asked to do a tour of America, playing three hundred seat joints in a van, we were also headlining Reading and Leeds Festivals in the UK. It was obvious which ones we were going to do. Get paid a half a million dollars to do Reading and Leeds Festivals, or get three or four hundred bucks to play Arlene’s Grocery on Stanton Street in New York.
If you want to break it in America, you've got to do thousands of those smaller gigs.
Well, we were lucky early on. We got an opportunity to open up for U2 around America, which was really good for us. We went gold in America on the first record pretty quickly, because we were playing to 60,000 people every night. But it was still difficult, we’d go do promotion and hit the Live at Five news crews at the venues, but you could see them thinking, ‘What's up with this band that plays all these different kinds of music’?
Arguably, the UK, Germany and other parts of Europe were more accepting of music that mixed genres up.
Initially it was Benelux that was the big hitter for us. On the first trip we were driving through Holland and we wanted to get some weed or something. We stopped off in Haarlem and we went walking by these coffee shops, and they were playing our record. We went. ‘This is the spot, I guess!’
Did you go in and get a free sample?
We did not get a free sample!
Fun Lovin‘ Criminals worked well for several years, but then the band came to an end. Why was that?
This is all with the benefit of hindsight, because I didn't know a lot of this was happening, but over the last 10 years I was doing other things aside from the band, like radio shows and some television and writing, and I maybe wasn't a hundred percent focused on the band. That created some resentment with the other two guys in the band. Every year I made an effort to break off enough time where we could do some touring and do some festival shows that they could make a living. I wasn't a dick about it, but I was raising a family and I was trying to do a lot of other things as well. Fast forward to about four years ago, before the band broke up, they trademarked the name Fun Lovin‘ Criminals behind my back, while I was still in the group. They had this idea of breaking me out of the band and then continuing as Fun Lovin‘ Criminals without me. And that's eventually what happened. To try to keep it light I always say the band broke up and they didn't get the memo, but essentially that's what happened. I guess they decided that they were going to be successful without me, which really hasn't panned out for ‘em.
I'm just happy that I'm able to make my album and do my tours and continue to make music, because for a couple years there, man, I was very emotionally wounded and hurt from what they did. Just the audacity of it, and the underhandedness of people that you thought were your family, that they would do something like that. It was really messed up. I guess those guys have put music out, I don't pay attention, but when they hear my new record I think people will realize where the talent ball fell. It is interesting to see the them continue to trade off of the music that I created, and act like as if I had nothing to do with it.
Was it a similar situation to Pete Townshend and The Who, where he’s the musical generator but he does many other things outside the band and the other guys have to wait for him to be ready to do things? The Who managed to do that, and your guys didn't?
That’s a good way to put it. They didn't!
You wrote Rebel Heroes: The Renegades of Music & Why We Still Need Them, a non fiction book about the cultural importance of mold-breaking musicians.
That was my first published book. I guess it was the beginning of me trying to diversify my efforts as far as being an artist.
In it you said that you unfortunately had become disillusioned by music. Your situation with the band would not have helped that, but were you disillusioned by music in general at that time?
Yeah, that's why I was compelled to write the book. I listen to new music on a daily basis, because of my radio show [on BBC 6 Music], and I always try to see what the kids are doing. But I was seeing all these young artists that were extremely talented, gifted people who were, for lack of a better term, ignoring the world around them. The artists that I always connected with, that I thought were in a different class, were the ones that were compelled to make music, not ones that wanted to make music to make money, to bang chicks or get jewelry or whatever, and that's where the idea of the book initially came from. When I started doing the research, I realized how vapid and devoid of soul a lot of this new music is, because it's been incrementally dumbed down to be the side salad. It's no longer the main course. I think I addressed that in the book over and over again, maybe ad nauseam [laughs], but I tried to draw the story out from a lot of these great artists – their need to make music.
Do you still feel that way, or do you think things might be getting a little bit better?
You see interesting bubbles of excitement in the music business, like that whole thing with Drake and Kendrick Lamar last year, that culminated in Kendrick playing at the Super Bowl and calling Drake a pedophile in front of a billion people. Now, I thought that was great, because I was always of the school that thought Drake was an industry plant from Canada who was like one of those Mickey Mouse kids that they threw a beard on and told him he was urban, and it was really corny music. To see someone with integrity and authenticity like Lamar come out there and pretty much tell him, yo, you're not like us, and have that resonate with so many people around the world, that encouraged me to think that maybe, possibly, perhaps, people are down with the real stuff, but they're just not avail to it. So if you give people the option of something that's a little bit more complex, that has a little bit more dimension to it, they'll want that. It's just that the industry has gotten to a point where all these near misses are costing them way too much money, and they want another Justin Bieber, because Justin Bieber does what he’s told.
When I was a kid I would save up my money and I would go out and buy, for instance, the new Rockpile record. I’d get home, put it on the record player, and initially go, Wow, I don't get this. I understand the elements. I love Nick Lowe. I love David Edmund’s guitar. But I had to listen to it a couple of times to understand it, and get it. That's what I thought art was about. The obligation was on the person who wanted to enjoy the art. It wasn't on the artist himself to get you to be interested in it. It was like, I bought this record, I couldn't bring it back, so I had to get into it. The obligation was on me to find something in it I could enjoy. And when you do that, you actually invest time and effort into something.
Nowadays, with streaming, you don't have to buy music and you don't have to financially invest in it. How I approach music is to try to have it do something to me, but have me be the person that's actually in charge of that process. I think a lot of people just want the music to wash over them and make them feel a certain way, and it may, but you have to be ready to get in that bath.
Is streaming a good thing because you can find any sort of music that you want and then it'll suggest other things to you, or a bad thing because music becomes just a throwaway commodity and you're not invested, financially or emotionally.
If you're not emotionally invested in it, what good is art? That's the whole point of it. I see where you’re coming with streaming. I'm not an old fogy. If you like Latin music and you like Guillermo Villalobos, and the algorithm gives you some other guy that's similar, that's great. But algorithms are just computer programs designed to keep you engaged.
At a BBC event recently I was talking to Tim Davie, the Director General of the BBC, and we were talking about how, when you defy an algorithm, it could be looked at as a positive thing or a negative thing depending on your perspective. If I'm DJing, when I defy the algorithm and you can only get cool music in a certain sequence from me, I think that's a good thing. And the listeners to my show think that's a good thing. From the perspective of the BBC, wouldn't it be easier for them to not have to pay me and they can just write a computer program that will do that? So me defying the algorithms is, in their view, a bad thing. My perception is that defying the algorithm is good. Mr Davie’s perspective was, it's problematic. Initially we had almost diametrically opposed positions, but we had a great conversation about it.
It can get boring when, say, Spotify keeps giving you more of the same. DJs like you and Cerys Matthews and Radcliffe & Maconie throw in things I would never have thought of listening to – but sometimes I love it.
Yeah, I'm a carbon based computer! [laughs] In America they have satellite radio. I love doing big, long drives in the States and putting on, maybe, yacht rock from the ‘70s, and you can play it for 19 hours and they never repeat, and it’s golden! But then sometimes you want, as Monty Python would say, ‘something completely different’. That’s the spice of life, if you fall into a yacht rock rut, it's sometimes good to get knocked out of it by some salsa, or some punk rock or something.
So you and those other DJs give people who love music things that they didn't know they liked yet?
That's a great way to put it, man. A lot of my British friends say, how did you know that song? Well, radio’s different where I grew up. It's not like I'm some Brainiac who writes everything down. I spent my youth in the Northeast, I spent my young adulthood in the South and the West coast when I was in the Marine Corps, and that informs a whole different set of radio songs. So I feel like I have about ten or fifteen years left of those ‘I didn't know I liked that’ moments coming at you.
We need to talk about your tour, which is coming up in May. What sparked you off to play music again?
It took me many years until, frankly, Alan McGee [founder of the Creation and Poptones record labels] got in touch with me and asked me if I wanted to make music again. Apparently the other two guys had approached him to have him manage them, and he was like, ‘Are you guys kidding me? Where's Huey?’ He brought me out of what I called my self-induced retirement, for lack of a better term, because I was just not feeling making music anymore. Such a bad taste was left in my mouth that I thought it would be forever. It was a redemption curve that happened at the right time with him. That was about a year ago. Now I’m back on the stage, doing a tour, recording an album, and putting the book out.
When were you last on the road for any length of time?
I did some shows last spring, just to see if I could actually still play shows. Alan McGee came up with this really good idea. Him and his partner, Kevin, are very insightful men. They said, if you're gonna go out there and just jump on stage and sing ‘Scooby Snacks’ with no explanation of where you've been, people are gonna look at you and go, ‘Dude, you're just in it for the money. You're not in it for the love.’ Maybe you should go around and personally reintroduce yourself to people. So I went out and I did this one man show, about 40 gigs around the country, little tiny joints, 200 people, and went and told my story. I spent the first half with my guitar playing some songs, telling people how they came about, just explaining my life and who I am, and then the second half answering people's questions in this very raucous environment.
A friend of mine who's a singer in a band does these kinds of things too, and he said it's a great way for people to realize why they liked you in the first place. It's about making that connection with people, you meet them where they are, and then the connection’s re-established.
Now we're doing a bunch of gigs throughout the month of May in the UK. I put together this great band. Two from New York who are some of my oldest friends, there's King on bass, and Mateo diFontaine was the original DJ in the Fun Lovin' Criminals and he plays keys and does some slide guitar. Then we got two guys from the UK, a drummer named Ben Gonzalez and a keyboard and guitar player called Adrian Gautrey, he's an amazing, talented guy as well. Between the five of us, this is the best representation of the music that I've ever had the pleasure to play. I'll tell you, the Fun Lovin' Criminals was a badass band back in the day, but we’re taking it to the next level now. I don't think I should come back to just do the same shit I've been doing. People could have just watched a YouTube video. If you come back you have to do it a little bit better, or what's the point, man?
And there's new music involved as well?
Yeah, I got a new record. I've just signed a record deal, and the first single is gonna be out in September, probably right along the same time as Quercus puts the book out. The convergence is there. And I can't really talk too much about it, but I might be on television on a regular basis around that time as well.
For me, it's a personal renaissance, and I take every day as a gift from God, especially at my age – I'm 56, putting out a debut solo record, it's amazing.
You've done several TV shows, but nothing regular. I could see you as fronting a new 21st century Old Grey Whistle Test.
It's funny you say that, I've been talking with a good friend of mine who was behind a lot of those big kinds of shows, and we're working on some stuff at the BBC. I did a series for them called Huey Morgan's Latin Music Adventure back in 2020, I did three of them and I wanted to do more. I'm really interested in doing music based documentaries, that's what I'll be working on in the next couple years.
Finally, what is the best thing about being Huey Morgan?
The best thing about being Huey Morgan is that I'm still doing it. Someone asked me about my career, and I said I don't bristle at that word, but when people say the word career it presupposes intent. [laughs] What I've always tried to do is make connections with people. It started as a kid on my little Portastudio in my bedroom at 13. I'm still trying to do that now. Sometimes I get paid for it, most of the times I don't, but the best thing about being me is that I'm still able to do it. I've had good days, I've had bad days, I've had in-between days, but when I wake up, I realize that everything I do is is around music, and that's what keeps me invested and keeps me interested and keeps me enthusiastic. And I don't know about you, but enthusiasm is one of the best things on the planet.
It's obviously working for you.
Positive mental attitude, guy, I'm PMA, all the way!
The Fun Lovin’ Criminal - A Memoir by Huey Morgan will be published by Quercus Books on September 11, 2025
For concert tickets go to www.hueymorgan.com
