Buzz Magazine headed to Moles Club in Bath to have a chat with the irrepressible and charismatic Huey Morgan, and it was one of the most enjoyable interviews we’ve done for a long time. Talking Block Parties, radio shows and his love of dogs, the former Fun Lovin’ Criminals frontman has seen and done it all. But he’s not finished yet…
Could you talk about the DJ set, the NYC Block Party? How did you come up with it, and how have you decided to curate the night?
The thing about the Block Party is that it kinda came about out of selfish necessity. I’ve been travelling around the world for twenty-something years, having a good time with Fun Lovin’ Criminals. And we were lucky enough to have our own DJ, this guy Mateo [DiFontaine], who would come with us — and if we were doing an afterparty, or in between the bands, we’d put Mateo on, and he set the scene really? And it was something we didn’t see anywhere else in the world. So, years later, now I’m married and I have kids, and you’re trying to get out on a Friday night with your wife… You’re too young to understand this, but years from now, you’ll be like, “Yeah, I get it now!” You have to get a babysitter. You have to make sure you don’t have do anything early-early the next day, like work or whatever. You make a big plan out of this, and you go out. And hopefully it’s a club you like, or you see a DJ you might know — but now everybody plays EDM and they drive you crazy with this Drake shit. And it just freaks you out if you’re an older person. Like I say, “older person” — I mean, over 25, when you’re thinking for yourself and shit.
I kinda came up with this idea: when I go out with my wife, I don’t wanna fuck it up. I don’t wanna go out there and spend all this time and effort to get my wife alone, and have to go out and listen to “banging techno”, or some Diplo stuff — I like that kinda stuff, but not for that vibe. So I thought to myself, “Shit, why don’t I get a couple of DJs I know and love to do nights, right?” But then I realised, these guys want a lot of money.
My wife (who’s brilliant) was like, “Why don’t you just do it? You know all the tracks that they’ll play, you can set it up, you can do it. I’ve seen you DJ in clubs before.”
So, with a little prodding, my wife got me to start doing these nights, and I started doing it because people kept asking me to DJ ‘cause I was on the radio. But you can’t DJ a radio show live. I mean, you can’t play Crosby, Stills & Nash on a dancefloor with people like, “Yeah, Our House, great song, but…”
I kinda had this idea of doing what I know, right? And what I know is those late-70s/early-80s block parties in my old neighbourhood. And it was stuff that we call “classics” now — y’know, Luther Vandross, Chaka Khan, that kinda stuff that set the mood. Then you’d move it in to what the kids kinda liked, which back then was like electro, a little early hip-hop. It started becoming a thing that you’d go out to and you’d know how the pace would be, of the night. And it’d get a little hectic, the closer it got to midnight — and with that, I took that ethos, and tried to do that myself.
I started doing some shows out and people started digging it. And it was unusual because most people like the familiar; they like to listen to what they were listening to in their car at the club. But I was from a different generation; I would go to see DJs that would do something completely different that I wasn’t able to mimic on my own, or do with an algorithm, right?
So, that’s how it all came about. I’ve been doing it now for about a year, give or take — cut the breaks, maybe about eight to ten months. And I’ve been going to different places, and I’ll be going back to certain places that kinda get it. And I’m gonna go back to certain places that don’t get it, because I know they will. And so the idea is me bringing a quality-controlled evening to people that have shit going on.
Are you still digging through the crates and discovering music? Is that a conscious effort?
You kinda have to. If music’s your life, and I think music’s my life, you have to constantly be on Bandcamp, you gotta constantly talk to all your DJ friends. Always have something going on. If you look at your musical knowledge as like a lake, right, you gotta freshen up that lake or it’s gonna get stagnant. You gotta keep moving new stuff into it — get the new carp in?
I was with Mateo this weekend; I’m hitting him up for all these mixes I’m hearing him do, and he’s asking me about all these different things I did. There’s always that kind of back-and-forth with DJs, and music guys. I mean, if you’re in a band, people are giving you CDs for their band, and it just keeps moving around. That’s what helps the situation, rather than saying you can’t do certain stuff ‘cause it doesn’t fit into the vibe.
Do you still experience and listen to music in the same way, with the same passion that you did when you were younger?
It’s easy to become jaded over years of listening to music because we do have, like, a sweet spot in our lives where music means the fucking world to us. And then, on either side of that, is life, right? So what I try to do, instead of staying in that sweet spot, I’m branching out from that sweet spot and keeping one leg into it, trying to find stuff I love. I think, if you consciously try to love stuff that you hear, you’re gonna be okay. I mean, it’s when you hear, “Oh, it’s not like the stuff that I used to listen to back in my day!” It kinda puts you in that negative headspace, that negative mental attitude — and I’m all Positive Mental Attitude, so that’s what you have to try to do. In anything really, but especially in music that helps.
Have you got any touring memories of Cardiff?
Being in Cardiff was not being in England, you know what I mean? It was a very specific thing to us, as a band. In Cardiff, it seemed to me (because I think it’s a big college town) a lot of people were bringing outside influences into a port city, right? And New York’s a port city so, I kind of identify with that. I think people were excited to see something new and different, and we’d take chances on a Friday night. We were talking before about how I’m doing the Block Party, but when people used to take chances, you used to find cool stuff. And that’s why I think we started getting a good following in Cardiff, ‘cause we’re a live band, right? You can listen to our records — that’s great. When you see us live, it’s a different thing. So, when they see us live, they go, “Oh, that was cool.” And when we’d come back, it seemed to be like the party was on. This was before social media, but the smoke signals were up, man. We were in town and people were ready. So, it was always fun, man, we had a great time.
I know that creative control is always something you’ve really strived for, even from the start of your career. How did you manage that with a major label?
You know what, it was dumb luck really. There’s a guy, Bob Power, who produced A Tribe Called Quest, and a number of others, D’Angelo… A great producer. And at some point, the label asked us who we wanted to produce our record, ‘cause we didn’t think we could do it ourselves at that point. We said Bob Power, ‘cause he could bring a little of that Low End—he did The Low End Theory [1991 A Tribe Called Quest album] and a lot of great stuff. And we thought that he could help with what our sound was gonna be, right?
We sent him some mixes of what we had gotten together as, like, a demo. And then he came into this big meeting at EMI, and we’re all sitting there — everybody; half the board of EMI are there, our project manager, A&R guys, everybody, head of the label. And they say, “So, Bob, what do you think about this tape that the guys gave you?”
He was like, “Well, I think they’re on the right track. They don’t need a producer; they need a good engineer. And this guy, Tim Latham, is the best engineer I know.”
By Bob Power saying that, that we didn’t need a producer? We didn’t need a producer. I don’t think he knew what he said at the same time either. But being on a major label, and signing an eight-record deal, they got a little bit scared at one point, like, “Oh shit, what we gonna do, they’ve already signed the piece of paper, we’ve already given them the money.” And the thing about the music business: if you say you can do it, they’ll let you hang yourself.
This guy Bob Power said, “You don’t need a producer.” We got with Tim Latham, who was like, “Look, I see what you guys are talking about. We can do that.” And then, we were in the studio for five days and did the whole record pretty much, like 90% of it. We played it for them five days later, and they were like, “Oh wow, that’s okay. You guys know what you’re doing.” That was the kinda dumb luck that got us able to do it. And plus, half the battle is saying you can do it. And then doing it.
[wpdevart_youtube]7ZEGP5oF_G8[/wpdevart_youtube]What was the time like between recording and releasing Come Find Yourself?
It was just, all of a sudden, going from being a bartender and broke, chipping in for weed with your friends to buy, like, a 20 bag… To actually buying the 20 bag by yourself, maybe two? Buying a leather jacket. Starting a bank account. It was all this kinda weird shit that we didn’t expect to do working in a nightclub. It was all this becoming a person in the legit world, like the government world.
How did you go about keeping, creatively, the same level of musical integrity that you guys did?
That kinda came because we had a good crew of friends, and we liked them and they liked us, so we didn’t get a new set of friends. A lot of times, when you start making money, your old friends kinda fall off and you’re just not in that same headspace with them. But lucky for us, all our friends were making money anyway. They were criminals, alright? Frankly. So they were making money, so it wasn’t like we weren’t hanging out in the same spaces, and they kinda kept us humble in a lot of ways.
And also it’s before the internet too. I mention this because I had a friend who’s an arch-criminal in New York and he used to laminate his pictures in the newspaper when he got arrested. So, he’d always have them in this little book in his trunk, and every time he’d get wasted he’d be like, “That’s me, okay, that’s Jimmy J, and look, see, he’s got his hand over his face, he’s a pussy.” And then he’d show you stuff like that and it’d be hilarious.
I remember he took me to his car one day after work, when we were hanging out. He’s like, “I gotta show you something special.” It was something I did—well, it wasn’t even actually me. Some girl said that she had slept with me in one of these tabloids here in this country, and they did like a full page on it, and he’d laminated it and put in his book.
He goes, “‘Cause I know you, ‘cause I know you, I put that in there. That’s fuckin—do you know this broad?”
I’m like, “No, I’ve never met her.”
He’s like, “It’s tremendous, I mean, look at it, she gives you a great review.”
And it was this hilarious thing. I thought, just the fact that a guy who is, in his own right, a legend in New York City, takes it upon himself to consider me that funny. Y’know, stuff like that keeps you humble, ‘cause you realise it really doesn’t mean anything. And the fact that someone all the way over in New York City gave a fuck? That’s kinda funny.
How did you find taking that album on the road again for its 20th anniversary?
Come Find Yourself [20th Anniversary Tour] was 2016, and it was fun doing it ‘cause you hear a lot of bands who do their album in total, right? And they kinda lose you, at like the fourth song, ‘cause they’ve played all their hits already? The way we track-listed it, it kinda got us over. We played, like, Scooby Snacks, and the album opens with Fun Lovin’ Criminal… But the fact that we did it in, like, 40 minutes, and then took a break, and then came back — I think that’s what kinda worked it out for us. It was fun to do.
We weren’t in there like Gram Parsons, trying to do a Steely Dan record or something. We knew at some point someone was gonna say, “Alright, play this live!” at. As a producer, you can get caught up in the minutiae of all those things… But that’s the thing that we tried not to do, and I think that’s what kept us, in a lot of ways, able to do other records without getting too poppy.
It was easy, especially on EMI, to kinda go, “Hey, let’s work with Avril Lavigne.” I mean, that was a thing too! Y’know, they’d say, “Hey, you should do a duet with Avril Lavigne!” And we were like, “Nah, get outta here, no!” And because we had this eight-record deal, it gave us the mental freedom — and the financial freedom. They sometimes would put stuff on you, to sell a certain amount of records, so if you didn’t do that then you were kinda screwed. But if you had an eight-record deal, they couldn’t drop you because then they’d have to buy out all the other options, so you’d be rich anyway so fuck it. It added up. So in that weird hip-hop mentality, where a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush… If you roll through the music business, in our time period, late-90s on, that was the only way to go. I mean, I don’t even know how I’d do it now; it’s completely bonkers, man. These young kids that are coming up now, it’s like, if they don’t have a charting single, they get dropped — they don’t even make a record. It’s terrible, man. The turnover’s like vicious.
Did you find any trepidation going back into your back catalogue and opening up your past? How did you compartmentalise that with just going in and getting the new record done?
Well, to get into the studio to do this record was just a feat in and of itself, because the three guys in the band, we all live in different parts of the country. It’s just personalities weren’t really meshing, right? So just getting in the studio, I had the idea of doing another Mimosa ‘cause it was cover songs. We weren’t actually writing our own music at that point. I just wanted to get in the studio and get the juices going. And that’s how it started. And because it was under the guise of another Mimosa, which was like our first record, the pressure wasn’t 100%, it was maybe 60?
You’d go in there, and you’d record as a producer and as a musician, but you weren’t necessarily writing. So that’s how this one got done. And then I think through that we find, just by making music, even if we were doing cover songs and it sounds kinda unique to our sound, it gives us a little more confidence to write our own material. And that’s the deal we did with Sony, which was a two-record deal, so we got this one going out to float it, and then we’ll see if we can come back with another one.
It’s not quite like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark making a comeback, but if we can still get in the studio and not kill each other, and make something that we think is cool. And like I said, quality control is important, so if it’s not cool, we’re not gonna put it out.
You transition between radio hosting and being a DJ. Was that always an aspiration, or was your show something you just moved into?
Well, it was weird — that’s a funny story actually. And it’s a good one too, ‘cause it’s kinda how I live my life. If people give me an opportunity to do something, good or bad, traditionally, I take it and see if I like it. I was working on a dog show for charity in the UK a couple of years back. And the lady who’s in charge of the artist booking knew a lady who was an agent. I’d met her, and I didn’t have an agent, I just married my wife and I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. There’s a bunch of things you can’t do when you aren’t doing the band 100%. You just kinda sit around, you get bored, and you either become a drug addict or you get a podcast or something, right, y’know what I’m saying?
I had lunch with this agent, and she says, “I work at this agency and we do radio shows, and you have a good voice for this country because it’s unique, and you know about music. Would you consider doing a radio show?” And I said, “No, I haven’t, let me try.” The thing is, I had a big record collection at the time — I lost it in a hurricane but… And I thought, at least I could just play records and maybe not talk too much. ‘Cause that was the thing, I didn’t wanna be that guy, the dude who’s like “meh-meh-meh, and-then-I-did-this, and-then-I-had-lunch”… I just wanted to play records. That’s how it started. And I didn’t wanna talk too much, and the whole point was that I should talk because, y’know, it’s interesting, right? I had to get past that self-aware thing.
Over years, I started enjoying it because, as I mentioned before, that’s when I started to get back into really loving music and listening to it a lot more than I did. There was a time when I didn’t listen to music as much as I should have. It’s good to find those things out, because then you can get back into your groove.
How important is it for young people to jump on the radio, to go see DJ sets, and get introduced to different kinds of music?
Count Basie said it almost a hundred years ago. “Recorded music is an approximation of a live event.” When you go to something and you’re there in something, it’s a total immersion of yourself. And that’s what’s cool about going out to see bands, going to DJ spots where you don’t know what’s gonna happen. With the whole internet thing, and people able to do it almost remotely, we lost the significance of that event. It wasn’t something that we had as a reference point, because it was so far removed over time. I think people are starting to get back into that, and going out. The pendulum’s swinging back, and they’re like, “Wow, look at all this shit going on outside this bubble!” And I think that’s the good thing I see. And I know a lot of people in my age group who are like, “Oh, the internet blah-blah-blah.” I think it’s fantastic, ‘cause you can get into something you wanna get into specifically, in a very short period of time, when it would take years in ‘book time’. That said, when people come out of that bubble, as they do inevitably, they see all this great stuff. And I think that’s the dichotomy that we need in society, where you have a little mix of both.
You’ve got your finger in a lot of pies, not only in music. What’s your big advice for people going into music?
You see a lot of different things when you get into the music business. And one of the things, I guess—growing up in New York, this was instilled in me from a young age… There’s only a few constants in life. I did invest in a garbage company early on, because I knew that was a constant in New York.
I think a lot of times, especially with music—and I may be off, because it’s maybe a couple years or a decade out but—I think what people should stop doing is thinking that music is gonna solve problems. In a lot of ways, as a musician, it causes more problems if you wanna do what you wanna do uniquely. ‘Cause at that point, there are only so many Justin Biebers, there are only so many Drakes, and stuff, so you have to be almost different. And right now, that’s not celebrated. So, to think that someone like Clive Davis is gonna pluck you out of obscurity like you’re Whitney Houston and make you a billionaire overnight — that’s not gonna happen anymore. Those stories just don’t occur, because that’s not the environment that the music business is in right now. So I think most people should have, not necessarily a day job, but some other way to hustle. And usually, musicians who are really good at what they do have that mentality anyway. But yeah, what I would say is ‘diversify’! [Laughs] If you gotta be a Deliveroo rider at night to do your shit during the day, do that. ‘Cause it’s the financials that are the things that are gonna get the stickiest quickest.
What keeps you going creatively? What’s the burning passion in you? Is it the same passion you had when you were fifteen, twenty, or is it a different thing that keeps you going creatively?
Passion’s a great word for just doing what you’re doing. I think, when I look back on when I first started to wanna get into playing guitar, I was probably a little older than my son is now. I see in him this really innocent wonder at music when he hears something he likes. He doesn’t give a fuck if it’s Phil Collins. If he likes it, he likes it. In a lot of ways, being a dad, and seeing how impressionable I once was, brings you back to the idea that everybody’s uniquely derivative of their influence, right? If you embrace that, you can stay true to your old-school beliefs. But at the same time, if you embrace that, you’re never really cutting anything off from inspiring you. And that’s what I think almost 50 years on this planet has taught me, it’s that: don’t not go somewhere because you’ve already been there. Go there again. If it sucks again, it sucks again. But you’re not gonna die from it. So, in a lot of ways, I think, continue to try to be inspired by stuff that hasn’t worked the first time.
Huey Morgan’s NYC Block Party. The Globe Cardiff, Sat 4 Aug. Tickets: £12/£14. Info: www.globecardiffmusic.com