"We had everything a musician could want": Fun Lovin' Criminals' Huey Morgan talks ahead of Birmingham show
The world’s finest and only purveyors of cinematic hip hop, rock ‘n’ roll, blues-jazz and latino soul vibes – Fun Lovin’ Criminals – will return to the West Midlands for a headline show at The Mill, in Birmingham’s Digbeth, on Thursday.
The band formed in 1993/1994 and has always been a cult status band.
Frontman Huey Morgan says: “We were lucky when we first got signed. We signed with a major label and had a hit record. It was crazy.
“We had everything a musician could want, man. We had artistic freedom, financial freedom, and then we did a tour with U2 and I think we popped off. I think we sold like 500,000 records in America. It went gold in America and then, almost immediately after that, it started picking up in Europe.
“We then started touring Europe more than we did America. We headlined at Reading and Leeds Festival, then we went to do a van tour of the East Coast for like three grand, which had to be split three ways.
“We did that, because as a working musician, then you wanna do cool stuff like that. The by-product of that was coming back to New York and being completely anonymous and I could still hear the same stories that I heard the year before, and not be like, you know, not be changed by the situation.”
After a lengthy period out of the game, the band returned to live work and also recorded a new album.
Huey adds: “Well it’s gonna be called, Another Mimosa. We did a bunch of covers and some originals, and some reworking’s of our own stuff. We did a really cool version of some of the stuff off 100% Columbian, as it’s the 20th anniversary of that.
“A couple of years ago, we weren’t really getting along as brothers, ya know? I guess life just got in the way, and I was figuring that maybe we could get together and try and just do a couple of cover songs.
“I thought that we could go into the studio as producers, and not actually have to think about writing stuff, and just go in there and do some two dimensional kind of things, pick people’s music and just start messing with things, and it was great!
“We all started hitting it off again, and here we are a year and a half later, and we’ve got some great stuff, and we are ready to do a whole original record next year.”
