I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Evelyn Waugh.
Mr Waugh would have had a field day with the Fun Lovin Criminals, currently one of the hottest bands extant, which U2 s choice of them as support band for PopMart confirms. Although their debut album Come Find Yourself is a slightly patchy listening experience, it does possess enough moments of supercharged musical acumen to suggest that if they keep their wits about them, we could be looking at the new Beastie Boys (and after the sorry-arsed mess that was 1994 s Ill Communication, Christ knows we need one).
The singles Scooby Snacks , King Of New York and The Fun Lovin Criminal will no doubt be familiar to anyone who has given MTV even a cursory glance over the past year or thereabouts. If so, you know most of what you need to know about the band: their schtick is basically that of three good-humoured, though vaguely belligerent chancers ambling around their home turf of New York, literally going wherever the music takes them.
The Fun Lovin Criminals are currently crawling around America as an auxiliary part of the PopMart monster which is doing its utmost to devour everything in its path with the minimum of fuss or, in plain English, they re supporting U2 in the States. And it is from the States (Pittsburgh, to be exact) that I am contacted on the phone by lead vocalist Huey Morgan, who is reclining in the bowels of the local gridiron stadium during a break from rehearsals.
Our first show, in Kansas City, was amazing, he begins. It was the first time we ve actually played one of those concerts that your older uncle has heard about, y know? (laughs)
Although I am eager for a few words on U2 along the lines of yeah-man-I-know-they re-a-bunch-of-corporate-cocksuckers-but-hey-they re-paying-our-wages, Huey successfully foils this line of enquiry by ejaculating a few of the saccharine platitudes which appear to be the sole genetic preserve of Americans.
When we were asked to do the support slot, he says in awe, in a few words, we were humbled, we were flattered, we were honoured and we were on our way. We considered it an honour and a privilege. It s like, (awed tone of voice) these are the guys who did all those great songs!
That said, I doubt that Huey is the sort of man who goes home of an evening and whacks on a CD of Zooropa to unwind after a long day in the studio, given that the Fun Lovin Criminals are stylistically as far removed from U2 as it is possible to get without venturing into Krautrock territory.
The band s origins were in a dance outfit called Moses On Acid, initially formed by the two other members of FLC, drummer Steve Borovini and bass player Fast (no second name forthcoming).
The three of us were room-mates, explains Huey. Fast had this sampler gadget, and one day me and him just literally got stoned and started goofing around together, him on the keyboard, me on the guitar, and it grew from there.
We put stuff down, and it sounded good to us, we liked it. We asked Steve to play drums at the time he worked at the Limelight venue. We asked for a gig, and they gave us one. After that, we would play shows there if a band cancelled their gig, we d fill in for them. Y know, we d do it for free, and the boss got a free band, so it was all good.
And then someone from EMI came down to see us and asked us if we wanted to make a record. This was after our sixth show. We said yeah. Next thing you know, we had a deal. We started playing little shows here and there, learning how to be a band (laughs).
FLC s seemingly hassle-free path to a major label deal was not without its troublesome obstacles, however. It transpires that they subsequently experienced several run-ins with their label, EMI, over the content of their work.
Well, when we first got signed, remembers Huey, there was a man named Michael Schnapp who was our A&R guy. He pretty much brought us to the head of the label and talked us up. He was our guy, our main homie. He s actually in the room with me here right now. They fired him because . . . he gave a fuck a little too much, y know? In the corporate world, you can t really do that. So what I do is, I try to keep a buffer between me and corporate people. I might say things that they don t wanna hear, and I don t wanna piss off my co-workers, y know?
This will give you an idea. Our next single is a 10CC cover, I m Not In Love , and we do it our way, we do it the lounge version. One guy from the record company was like Oh, you gotta have this guy remix it and put a jungle beat on it. I was like why? That s gonna sell it to the kids? What the kids like, is what we do.
Not what some ponytailed coke-snorter thinks they re into.
Yeah. You have people up there on the 22nd floor who aren t looking at it from the same viewpoint as you are, so sometimes you gotta put a buffer in there so you don t piss nobody off.
Come Find Yourself was recorded in early 1996, although you wouldn t necessarily know it from the amount of classic rock elements swirling all around it. Although it s a pretty enjoyable piece of work, there are about a dozen samples of riffs so old that they should be in nursing homes with catheters strapped to their legs, and the CD sleeve thank-you list even includes a mention for Steely Dan s classic 1977 album Aja.
Steely Dan are a great band, exalts Huey. They re the limit of cleverness that I can go to. It s like, if you wanna cover one of their songs, you fucking gotta go to college (laughs).
Did you go along to see them live when they reformed?
No. No. I don t do that. I don t believe in that shit. It s not the same they don t do drugs any more, they re all businessmen, they re like fucking accountants with instruments. I mean, Chevy Chase used to play in that band! He was the original drummer with them.
The Dan aside, what else tickles your aural palate?
I like Earth Wind And Fire. I ve liked them since I was a kid, because I used to have these black babysitters, they used to come over with all these soul albums. They d say to me, You wanna get the ladies when you re older? This is what you need to listen to. They schooled me.
Given that you re always namechecking the likes of Scorsese, Ferrara and Tarantino, what about films? What would you nominate as your favourite flick of all time?
My favourite film would have to be Raging Bull, he enthuses. You ever heard that expression You can t polish shit ? (laughs) It polished shit! It took reality and made it beautiful. The music, the black and white, the cinematography, the direction, and the rawness of the acting in it . . . Cathy Moriarty is wonderful in it as Jake LaMotta s wife, Joey Pesci is fabulous in it . . . the whole bunch of em. It s great.
Although Huey Morgan s chequered CV includes a couple of years in the US Marines, he is surprisingly reticent to talk about the subject I say surprisingly, given his effusively affable manner on virtually all other matters.
I was a real troublemaker when I was a kid, he says, so I was given a choice, and I decided to enter government service rather than a government penitentiary (laughs). To be quite honest, it isn t something I really like talking about it ends up sounding a little convoluted because I have mixed feelings about my time in the service.
I learned a lot about myself, I believe I grew up in there and that it did a lot of things for me. But by saying that, I give the impression that I suggest people should follow my example, do it for themselves. I don t wanna do that at all. It was a very personal thing for me. I don t wanna make anyone think it s a good thing to join the army.
Why not?
I just don t.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole atmosphere and feel of The Big Apple is central to the Fun Lovin Criminals and their music, as titles like King Of New York might suggest. Huey Morgan is a man who, if not quite in love with the city, has certainly been going steady with it all his life.
I grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he says. Looking back on it, I don t think we were poor, exactly. Y know, we ate, we had clothes (laughs), my mother supported me. I know there are a lot of places that are a lot nicer, but it s like any city where you have a lot of different ethnic groups living together. We re all in the same economic class, y know?
I see New York City as the biosphere that we all look to, to see how society s gonna progress or regress, and how race relations will get along. Because to be honest, in New York there s not the same racial tension that there is around the rest of the United States. We all live together; we all have to. In other American towns, they don t have to. One side of town is for the blacks, one side for the Latinos, one for the whites. There s enough room for that to happen. Nobody interacts. I ve met black people from the South who ve never talked to a white person.
I mean, okay, within reason, there are black neighbourhoods and Italian ones and Spanish ones but there are no Italian subways, or black subways, or Chinese subways. We all live, effectively, on an island. If you gotta live there, you gotta live there.
Where exactly do you live these days?
I live in Manhattan now.
Could you ever see yourself leaving New York and living somewhere else?
Yeah, yeah, if I was up on charges in New York state, I d probably go live somewhere else.
He says this with no discernible trace of irony whatsoever.
One of the best tracks on Come Find Yourself, recent single King Of New York , is a thinly-veiled love letter to former mob kingpin John Gotti, calling for the jailed gangster to be freed without further preamble.
Well, it s an allegory, explains Huey. It s about a guy named Frankie. He can t get it together enough to get into the mob, for whatever reason: the guys don t like him, he s a fucking mook, whatever. And he tries to break this young guy out of jail and hand-deliver him to the boys, and he figures that they ll let him in y know, if he brings em back the Messiah, they ll say OK, come on in .
But, as anyone who has heard the song will know, it all backfires on the would-be capo.
Yeah (laughs), y know, that s how it goes when you try to break someone out of a fucking penitentiary he s not even at!
While we re on the subject of John Gotti, the henchman who grassed him up to save his own skin a Joe Pesci-like creature named Sammy The Bull Gravano has just published his memoirs, Underboss, a book which is so graphic and casually vicious in its general tone that it makes Mario Puzo s The Godfather read like Angela s Ashes.
He s one hell of a rat, Huey asserts. The thing about Sammy The Bull which I found quite amusing when I heard it first he went to get plastic surgery to make himself look different, so that no-one would know who he was, and he got a facelift instead (laughs). The doctors were like, You wanna look different? , and he said, Fuck looking different! Take out a little under the eyes, a little more under the nose, make me look ten years younger. Fuck em!
Gravano, incidentally, is either the bravest man alive on planet earth or the stupidest, depending on your sense of gallows humour, for he has opted to forsake inclusion in any witness protection programme. His attitude is something along the lines of If you come to get me, you d better be good, because you ll only get one shot! .
Well, that s the only way to be at that point, reasons Huey. Everybody knows he s a rat bastard. So, like, he s gotta behave like that. If he s a rat bastard and he s hiding under a rock, he s even worse than a rat bastard. So now he s a tough guy rat bastard (laughs). He knows he s a rat. If something happens to him, something happens to him. That s his fucking attitude.
Of course, the whole subject of whether Fun Lovin Criminals should be writing songs about scumbuckets like Gotti and Gravano in the first place is another issue entirely. There s a particular anecdote dating from the 1980s which sums up Gotti s vile stock-in-trade perfectly, so brutal and sick that it bears repeating here in full.
One day, while reversing out of his driveway, a neighbour of Gotti s accidentally knocked down and killed the mobster s bicycle-riding son. Despite repeated pleas from friends and family to move away from the area pronto, the neighbour stayed put, reasoning that nobody with any sense would blame him for what, after all, was simply a tragic accident.
A week later, the neighbour received the first of several death threats. A week after that, he was beaten up by masked men outside his front door. Next, someone threw a Molotov cocktail through his letterbox.
The neighbour finally decided to get the fuck out of there while he still could. But while he was loading his belongings and furniture into the removal van, a numberplate-less car pulled up beside his house. Three men got out, dragged him into the car with them and drove off at speed. The neighbour was never seen again, and is rumoured to be buried somewhere in the Catskill Mountains.
Mmmm, muses Huey, sounding half appalled and half amused. It s just that the way these people live their lives, and the way they make money, is so appealing to the underclasses. I love it (laughs).
Let us look, then, at the other side of the law n order divide. As most of you will know, Zero Tolerance, the scaly legislative beast which John O Donoghue has embraced like a long lost lover in recent months and claimed as his own, actually originated in New York several years ago.
It resulted from a collaboration between New York s mayor Rudolph Giuliani and one of the local police chiefs, who worked together on creating a far more oppressive climate in the city in order to stifle crime at its roots. Although Zero Tolerance s espousers point to the undeniable plummet in New York s crime statistics as proof of its success, for many it remains an unacceptable reduction of basic civil liberties.
Unsurprisingly for a man whose album sleeve bore the legend SOCIETY PREPARES THE CRIME THE CRIMINAL COMMITS IT , Huey Morgan places both feet firmly in the latter camp, laughing knowingly when I tell him about all the tougher-than-thou bolloxology that went on during the recent election campaign here.
It s an impingement upon human freedoms, he says. I can t really speak about Irish politics, because obviously I know nothing about it, but in the States personal freedoms are becoming less and less. And it s something we really have to keep our eye on. Something like Zero Tolerance is just one little thing that in ten years will be one of the variables which comprises a totalitarian state, if we don t pay attention and check it.
Crime comes from people not having, and that stems from a whole bunch of different social issues. You can talk about the family, and from there go on to unemployment, and education, and so on. My statistics are probably wrong, but if I m even vaguely correct, we spend ten times as much on defence as we do on education. And you know something? The Russians ain t really bothering us any more, you know what I m saying? But we re still spending that amount of money. I don t think Canada s comin to get us (laughs).
An understatement if ever there was one.
Rudolph Giuliani was a federal prosecutor before he became Mayor, continues Huey. He put a whole bunch of mobsters in jail and he had contracts out on his head. I don t have a high opinion of him. I kinda understand where he s coming from, but I don t agree with him. I understand that he has a kid aged 6, 7, something like that, and he doesn t want the kid growing up in a city of craziness and whacko crazy bullshit.
As against that, most normal smart people who have children don t raise them in New York City.
Speaking of difficulties with the law, the Fun Lovin Criminals ran into two separate legal wrangles recently. Exhibit A: they were rapped on the knuckles for using snatches of Pulp Fiction dialogue on the single Scooby Snacks . Exhibit B: their drummer Steve Borovini was recently nabbed in England for allegedly making obscene phone calls to a women s gymnasium in Leeds.
Although Huey is untypically terse on the latter subject ( Our drummer s doing fine. Right now I believe he s sleeping calmly, police guard at the door. No, I can t really comment on that. It s not sub judice, because I know that it s all over with. It was all settled before he left England ), he reverts to his brash, ebullient self when I bring up the subject of their tussle with Quentin Tarantino over the aforementioned Pulp Fiction soundbites.
We got it sorted out to the point where Quentin Tarantino was smart enough not to come around and try to shake our hands, he snaps. He knew he d probably catch a slap. So yeah, he was smart enough to stay the fuck away from us. Y know, if you rob somebody, you gonna go back to their house and say hi?
Before all the mess blew up, we had heard that he liked the song, and that we could put the samples into it. Next thing, we hear from his lawyers saying that there was a problem with the writing credit. I mean, we weren t concerned with giving up the publishing shit. To make a record was the joy, not to make money.
As the interview winds to a close, talk turns to the Fun Lovin Criminals brace of Olympia shows on July 14th and 15th, which Huey is looking forward to in much the same way that a Rangers fan anticipates the latest Old Firm derby.
The way we do it is, we try to do two or three shows in each town, and then take a few days off, so our booking agent hates us, he laughs. I was talking to some of the guys from U2 yesterday don t they have a club there or something? We might just go and play at their joint or whatever.
And just one last thing given that you look like a cross between Robert De Niro and a short-haired Willy DeVille, you don t seriously expect us to believe that you ve got a bit of Irish blood in your veins, do you?
Yeah, I m half Puerto Rican and half Irish. The good half (laughs). n
Fun Lovin Criminals play the Olympia Theatre on July 14th and 15th.