Fun Lovin' Criminals

This isn’t the first time Outline’s chatted to Huey from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals; in fact it’s the third time. We just can’t get enough of his smooth, bad ass New York self. 2016 sees the 20th anniversary of Come Find Yourself, the Criminals’ debut album and the mama of such stonkers as Scooby Snacks and King of New York. Huey and the boyz are coming back to UEA to play the whole thing in full, and I had a chat with the man himself to find out about his 6Music show, being in the Marines and one of his favourite bands, Norwich duo BK & Dad.

So Outline has interviewed you before in 2005 and 2010. What are your memories of playing Norwich on those occasions?

Oh yeah! I remember one time in particular, in 2010; I had some last minute thing to do in London before the gig so I had to get a train up to Norwich. People on the train were saying “We’re going to see you tonight!” I showed up at UEA and there were people queuing up and saying “Shouldn’t you be inside?” I said “I’m going inside now! Don’t worry, get yourself a drink and I’ll be on stage as planned!”

You’re touring to celebrate the 20th anniversary of your album Come Find Yourself. It spent a year in the UK charts; did you expect your debut album to do so well?

Absolutely not. We were surprised that we got to put the record out in the first place. Being guys from New York who really don’t trust The Man, we went into the studio and recorded the whole thing in five days and that was our first instance of distrusting the establishment. We didn’t really expect anything to happen with the record, which is why we recorded it so quickly before the record company changed their mind. We had everything prepared in advance, so we went in there and laid everything down. I remember the A&R guys coming in and asking how we were getting on and we were like “We’re done!”

Can you remember all the words to all the songs on the album or are you gonna have to revise beforehand?

Ha! You’re not talking to Shaun Ryder here! I’m pretty sure I can remember all the words I’ve written. We’ve been playing those songs for twenty years now. It’ll be great to play all the songs in album order though, it’s gonna be fun. I remember we had a big board in the studio and that’s where we came up with the order of the songs on the album. It was really arduous to do, and now we’re going to be playing them in the order we decided on 20 years ago so we’ll see how we feel about the order now!

Which tracks from that album are particularly special to you?

I think any song on that record that people have a connection with is very important to us. Obviously Scooby Snacks, The Fun Lovin’ Criminal and King of New York are the obvious ones but there are also songs like Methadonia which are really great, The Grave and the Constant, Crime and Punishment..with songs like that it’ll be great to see the sort of people who react to them. We play for an audience rather than to them, it’s a bit of a different ethos where we come from.  As a musician and a lifelong fan of music I have always found myself liking a lot of album tracks by my favourite artists rather than the singles, although I’ve liked singles too. I think these days the art of the album is almost dead, and I think it’s important people kind of remember what an album used to be; a conscious thought rather than a bunch of fragmented ideas thrown together to make money.

When you wrote this album, was it a joint effort? How did the songs come together?

I think it’s interesting that you use the word ‘joint’ as there were LOTS of them! It was a very communal album. Working with the recording engineer Tim Latham was definitely the right thing to do. We were very impulsive as far as recording…we’d go between different bits of different songs all within a day’s work. We might put tracks down on like eight different songs with different instruments and switch around and Tim was like a ringleader, keeping us on the board and keeping track of what we’d done so far. And telling us when to stop as well, that was really important. You can overthink things, especially if you’re first time producers like we were, because we were producing our own debut album on a major label. We were definitely interested in trying to do the best we could and it was great having Tim there, as an amazing producer and engineer and the fourth member of the band.

There’s such a variety of genres and sounds on this album, from the lounge ballad Methadonia right through to Tom Waits vaudeville like Coney Island Girl. What did you grow up listening to?

The great thing about Come Find Yourself is that we, not very subconsciously, put all our influences into that record. All the music you hear on that record is all the music we loved growing up. I guess you could just say you can hear all our influences in our music. Looking back 20 years now, it was interesting in see how we inadvertedly influenced another generation of musicians who are now accepting and embracing different genres into their own music. People didn’t do that before we came out. That was the problem with our marketing strategy; people didn’t really understand what we were. A rap group, a rock band, some kind of weird experimental Beastie Boys cover band…people didn’t understand until they came and saw us. They realised we were playing all kinds of different music in one song but we didn’t force it. So I think that lends itself to us being able to play it 20 years later.

It’s a very sexy album. What were your love lives like when this album was written, recorded and released?