The original Fun Lovin' Criminals frontman chats about the album that changed his life and soundtracked a generation, “troublemaking” in NYC, his new anniversary tour “for the people” with a brand-new band, and the special story behind ‘Scooby Snacks’!
Photo credit: Eddie Hayes
Three decades on from the era-defining debut that gatecrashed the Britpop party with unmistakable New York swagger, original Fun Lovin' Criminals frontman Huey Morgan is reclaiming the songs that changed his life and soundtracked a generation.
When ‘Come Find Yourself’ landed in 1996, it didn’t simply arrive - it exploded.
Amid Britpop’s euphoric blur, Fun Lovin’ Criminals carved their own lane with a cinematic, genre-hopping sound that fused rock‘n’roll, funk, blues, soul, hip hop, jazz and Latin rhythms into something effortlessly cool and completely original.
Streetwise yet sophisticated, it was a Lower East Side state of mind delivered with groove-heavy basslines and razor-sharp storytelling.
“Trippy” Come Find Yourself
After founding Fun Lovin' Criminals and writing and producing their seminal hits, Huey Morgan is marking 30 years since the release of ‘Come Find Yourself’ with a brand-new tour.
“Once you put music out, it becomes everybody’s,” says Huey, “Three decades on, those songs ultimately belong to the people who made them part of their lives.”
And decades after the FLC’s debut album arrived on the Britpop scene, Huey has been taking that seminal record back on the road.
“It’s really trippy,” he explains. “Because you go back 30 years on anything and you’re a different person. When I made that record, those were all the stories that I had accumulated up to that point. I was 27.”
A troublemaker in NYC
“I’d been in the Marines, I’d been a bit of a troublemaker in New York City, and I was dealing with a lot of things in my life,” Huey continues. “It seemed to me that I was offloading a lot of that stuff into the lyrics.”
“The funny thing is, I wasn’t even supposed to be the singer,” he reveals. “I just wanted to be the guitar player. Fast and I were working together with Steve, making songs, and we hadn’t really figured out what the vocals were going to be like.”
He says the band knew they wanted it to be rap music. “But when we started talking to rappers we knew, they were talking about themselves and girls and stuff, and it seemed a little banal for the music. We’d put so much time and effort into making that music, and our influences were really varied.”
A musical mix of styles
“I’d always written poetry and things, and a lot of these songs were actually short stories or novellas I’d written over the years. I went back to my notebooks and started looking at those stories. That’s where songs like ‘King of New York’ came from.”
He says he and his fellow bandmates knew they wanted to mix a bunch of different styles together. “Fast was into electronic music, Steve had a lot of different influences, and I was a guitar player who had listened to all kinds of stuff growing up.”
“We really thought the music deserved more, lyrically. I wanted to make sure the lyrics were equal to the music. It was a challenge to make sure that what I was saying was worthy of the music we were creating.”
The album sounded very confident, considering they were still a new band. Where did that confidence come from? “It was probably 70% true confidence and 30% just winging it and hoping for the best!”
Signing to EMI
The band wrote and recorded a lot of the music before their record deal. “When we got signed to EMI, it freaked me out because I thought, ‘Wait, I’ve been listening to music my whole life and no one’s going to buy this!’”
“I just thought it was good music. I enjoyed making it. It was different and new, but I didn’t think anything would come of it. Because of that, I didn’t have any hang-ups about writing whatever I wanted to write about.”
The band didn’t have a manager back then. “So, I had a pretty serious relationship with the label through our lawyer and our A&R guy. The head of the label was a producer called David Seegerson, and he really understood what we were doing. His attitude was basically, ‘Whatever you’re doing, don’t mess with it.’ And that gave us confidence because we weren’t going back and forth with the label asking what they thought. We didn’t really give a damn what they thought! We were left to our own devices.”
From performers to producers
They were also told they didn’t necessarily need a producer. “We had asked Bob Power, who produced A Tribe Called Quest and a lot of other amazing music, to produce the record. He listened to our demo and basically said, ‘You don’t need a producer, you need an engineer’.”
That engineer was Tim Latham. “Tim was fantastic. He was a New York guy, technically one of the most amazing engineers we’d ever worked with, and we really hit it off with him.”
The band recorded most of the record in just five days. “The first day was drums, the second day we dropped all the samples onto the drums, the third day was keyboards, the fourth was guitars and the fifth was vocals. It was a really hard week, but we knew at the end of it that we’d got what we needed down.”
Then the label told the lads they had the studio for an extra three weeks. “We were like, ‘Oh, okay.’ So, we ordered food from Little Charlie’s, which was a great Italian restaurant in the neighbourhood, and had a really good time. But what we did during those three weeks was listen as producers rather than performers.”
Huey reveals they thought this would be the only record they ever recorded. “So, we wanted to put all those little things into it that we’d always wanted to hear on albums we loved. We had a little percussion day where we called ourselves the Cuervo Brothers, got a little drunk and did percussion. It gave us some perspective on the songs.”
“Special” Scooby Snacks
‘Scooby Snacks’, of course, became the defining track. “It’s funny because we actually had a version for the album that was faster and had a whole bunch of rock‘n’roll guitars in the chorus,” divulges the singer.
“We had the demo, though, and played it for David Seegerson, who said, ‘What happened to the syncopated, slowed-down, cool groove thing?’ We told him that live, we played it faster, and he was like, ‘Whoa, there’s something special about that’.”
David insisted that they revisit the demo version. “That was really the only time anybody got in our business about stuff. He explained that the reason the song was grooving with so many people was because the elements were pure and simple. There wasn’t a whole bunch of production on top of it.”
“When you’re producing your first major-label release and you have three weeks in the studio, you can become obsessed with adding things and taking things away. His advice made us realise that sometimes less is more.”
Sampling Pulp Fiction
Fast came up with the idea of using ‘Pulp Fiction’ samples.
“A lot of that song was put together by Fast. He put the Tones on Tail element in there, and I thought that was brilliant!” Huey discloses.
“The Tarantino stuff came from the fact that we were huge fans of Tarantino. We used to write a lot of our music in the living room of the loft we lived in, with the TV on but the volume down. We were always making music for films - soundtracks for films that didn’t exist.”
“With ‘Scooby Snacks’, we thought, ‘Who’s going to understand what the hell we’re talking about? Will they get the joke?’ Fast said it was kind of a Tarantino noir thing and suggested getting the laser disc and cutting a couple of samples out to see what worked.”
It was a great move, although the label initially didn’t like the samples because they were going to be expensive. “But I was sold. I thought those samples brought everybody into the joke. They gave people the context to understand that it was a funny song about a ‘what if?’, rather than ‘let’s go and do this’.
King of New York
If he had to pick one song that best represents who Fun Lovin’ Criminals were in 1996, which would it be?
“I’d say ‘King of New York’, Huey reveals. “It’s essentially a folk story about American mobster John Gotti, but it’s also quintessentially what we did. It had the hip-hop element, it was a story about New York City, and it had all these cultural touchstones.”
“I don’t think anybody else would have talked about John Gotti at that time without fearing they would get killed! I was married into a mob family at that point, so I had to have a sit-down with these guys to get it right. That song was the gateway for me to realise, ‘Okay, Fun Lovin’ Criminals would do this’.”
Time in the Limelight
The band worked at a nightclub called Limelight for many years before being signed. “We’d play shows there, test out new material and figure out what worked. We knew by trial and error what people in New York were down with. We weren’t really aiming outside New York City. Not even New Jersey. We were in our own little biosphere.”
When did they realise their music would have a life way beyond New York? “I remember the first time we left the United States. We went to Toronto to do a showcase for EMI and got into an argument with another band. We were going to fight them - it was going to be a beatdown!”
“The head of the label told us we weren’t doing the showcase because we were thugs and sent somebody to talk to me. He sat me down and basically said, ‘You’re not this guy anymore. You have an opportunity here that no-one gets’.”
“He told me I’d been through a lot, grown up on rough streets in New York, been a United States Marine and now had the chance to do something that transcended all of that. He said, ‘Don’t be stupid and screw it up’.”
“That was when I realised, ‘Wow, they wouldn’t be sending this important guy to talk to me if this was all for nothing.’ It made me rethink my whole operating system.”
Rocking the UK
The UK then beckoned and became a huge market. Why does Huey think British audiences connected so strongly with the band?
“Initially, it took off in the Benelux. We had a connection with a clothing company and our demo tapes were going out to skateboard shops around the world. People were discovering the music through that skateboard culture.”
“Because EMI was a British label, they realised they had something good when people in Holland and Belgium were digging it, and they put us on the front burner at EMI UK,” Huey explains.
“We came over to the UK and people started rocking with it almost immediately. We were juxtaposed against all the Britpop people were hearing. It was fresh, there was humour in it, and elements of popular music that weren’t necessarily rock. There was hip-hop, groove, acid jazz and all these different things. The UK was one of the few countries that was really eclectic in its radio. If it was good, people liked it.”
“We also weren’t afraid to talk to people, be funny, or not take ourselves too seriously. Shows like ‘TFI Friday’ helped break us.”
Same album – new band
Thirty years on, does he hear the hit album differently? “I hear it ALL differently. There’s that saying: no man steps in the same river twice. I go back to that record because I play the songs with my new band, and it’s great hearing them reinterpreted.”
Huey says an album is a snapshot of a period in time for an artist. “I was 27 and I was a very different guy. I was under a lot of pressure because we didn’t have a manager and I was juggling all these different parts of the music business. I don’t really remember it being a particularly fun time. Looking back, I’m now finding the different fun parts in it.”
“When you write a lyric, those feelings are still there in the words. So, when I revisit the songs, I can almost revisit that guy. I feel bad for him, too, because there was a lot going on inside my head while I was trying to put a record out and lead a band. It was a difficult time, but the fact that I made it through is kind of the triumph.”
Sage advice from Stevie Nicks
What does he hope people take away from the 30th anniversary shows? “I once spoke to Stevie Nicks at a party, and she told me she loved our record. We talked about music and she said something that really hit me. She said, ‘Once you put a record out, it’s yours to have, but you don’t own the music anymore. Everybody attaches their lives to it’.”
“That made me realise it’s not my music. I wrote it and performed it, but once it got into people’s lives, it became part of their lives. When people come to see me play, I see them revisit parts of their lives that were good, or maybe difficult, but they got through them. You can see the whole spectrum of human experience in people’s faces while you play songs that made a difference in their lives."
30th anniversary tour for the people
“As an artist, you can’t have a higher compliment than someone saying, ‘That song helped me’, or ‘That song makes me happy’, or ‘That song gives me perspective’. So, doing a 30th anniversary isn’t a selfish act - it’s something you’re doing for the people who bought the record and made it part of their lives.”
“I think nostalgia is a great thing. It reminds you that you had moments in your life that were amazing, fun and good. If you can revisit those, that’s a blessing.”
Lighting his own path
Radio, TV, writing, family, music… Huey now has so many different worlds, so where does being a musician fit into it all?
“It’s the by-product of living a life. If I were a painter, being a father, a husband, a radio DJ and all these other things would inform my painting. As a writer, I’m always trying to make sense of stuff because the world’s a crazy place and everybody has their own path. I try to light my path with the insights I gain from reflecting on my life.”
The Fun Lovin’ Criminal wasn’t just the name of his platinum ’90s anthem - it’s who he is.
Accept no imitations. The King of New York is back.
“I’ve been crazy looking forward to this tour. I’ve also been kind of nervous about it, but in a good way. It’s excitement. I don’t want to let down the people who are making my music part of their lives.”
“There’s a responsibility there that I appreciate probably more than I ever have!”
Remaining UK tour dates:
26-Oct-26 Southend Chinnerys
27-Oct-26 Cambridge Junction
28-Oct-26 Exeter Phoenix
29-Oct-26 Bristol Electric
Tickets available at Hueymorgan.com