Giittv’s own Joe Coyle caught up with Fun Lovin’ Criminals frontman, songwriter, broadcaster and actor Huey Morgan to discuss his eagerly awaited debut solo album Say It To My Face.
Hi Huey
Joe what’s happening!
Huey, you have a pretty successful radio career nowadays, how important is it for you to keep making music?
Joe, with being a musician first and foremost, playing all the stuff on the radio makes you fall back in love with music and you hear all these different influences that you come to love. Being a DJ really helped me make this record, it encouraged and inspired me.
Was it a conscious decision to make a different kind of record than you would have previously made?
Well it’s not a Fun Lovin Criminals record, it’s a different band, it’s a different feel.
My wife got me a guitar and I started playing it. The guitar had a lot of stories in it, they kinda just started coming out and that kind of tempo is where i was going with it.
I just wanted to make a record that me and the guys in the band could have for ourselves and have it mixed and mastered by someone good. Simon from Naim heard it and wanted to put it out and we were like ‘oh ok’. I realised, halfway along the line, that I did pour my heart and soul out vocally and the lyrics in there they are uncensored. When people enjoy this record or certain songs, I’m like, “thanks!” because it’s really personal to me. We didn’t know the album was going to be released so we didn’t filter ourselves in certain ways.
You have said you made a ‘grown up album about grown up people for grown up people’ but how much of the album is autobiographical?
I guess you can read into it yourself. I think anything anyone puts out / writes musically is autobiographical to a certain extent. Situations may vary and names are changed to protect the innocent. A lot of it is stories that you hear from friends of yours and things they go through.
With the song ‘Fall into me’, I was talking to a guy who was in Afghanistan. He had two weeks until he was back. He had this letter from his wife,everytime he saw her handwriting it would get him through the day and he finally made it home.
There are a couple of songs on this record about war because we are at war. As much as we decide we don’t want to talk about it or think about it, it’s f***ing going on. As we speak right now there is a gun fight going on in Afghanistan where people are getting killed. So as people in the western world to forget about it and not really pay attention to the news everyday is kinda bullshit. Making this record and having it put out I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is, so I’m giving all the money I make from the album’s sales to veterans charities and charities that are helping guys get back on their feet.
Homeless Vets went out there, and put their necks on the line for us and they have fallen to the wayside and I find that morally disgusting. I wanted to do something about it. When I decided to do that a lot of other people decided to help out. Danny Clinch and BJ Cole helped a lot. Other people helped out a lot knowing where I was coming from. It wasn’t like I was putting a record out to make tons of money. Being a marine, these things are close to me so I put my money where my mouth is.
Has the songwriting process changed for you over the years?
For years it would be Fast, Frank, myself writing the songs in the Fun Lovin Criminals. A lot of times on this record there would be collaborative stuff between me and Pete. A lot of stuff was just all me, songs I came up with musically and lyrically. The process has definitely changed but there is no real formula to it. If I come up with an idea, I’ll try and seek out what the music should be for it, if someone’s got a cool riff that will work, I’ll use that. If I come up with a cool one, I’ll use that.
The record seems to have a definite beginning, middle and end. How much of that was planned?
As an old school musician who actually listened to albums, I thought it was cool that on the vinyl of this album the last song on side A would be ‘It’s Alright’ and the first song on side B would be ‘Fall into me’ I thought it would be cool to have a record that had parts to it and has dynamic like old Stones records used to. A lot of pop stuff out there now has the same tempo and intensity all the way through where as I think dynamic is really important and i think it’s not really used to its fullest extent.
Was there any key track which set the wheels in motion for this record?
Fall into me was kinda the one that when I first wrote it meant a lot because I had talked to my friend about it. The story poured out, the chords were pure country and western, but there was a feel behind it that I really liked. It was like unfamiliar ground to me so it was cool to do it. It was a turning point where I realised I was going to be doing this kind of record and it wasn’t going to be a Fun Lovin Criminals record.
Were you thinking about production all the way through the record or did that come about as organically as the rest of the record did?
Initially I did the mics and pre amps and I realised it sounded really good but I could only take it so far. I called up Tim Latham (De La Soul, Lou Reed) who I worked with in the Criminals. Tim was really helpful, we went through it with a fine toothcomb and made it sound like record rather than a bunch of songs
How did the band dynamic work with the guys you got in to help make this record?
It’s 100% collaborative. Like I said before we didn’t expect it to released so if Pete (Levin) did a piano track or an organ track it was what Pete wanted to do and if Frank (Benbini) wanted to play drums on something it was what Frank wanted to do, that’s the good thing about this band.
The first time the band were all together in the same room was about 2 weeks ago when we were doing the video and that was interesting because we all know each other.
I’ve played with the guys in the Tangiers Blues Band for years and most of those guys are in the New Yorkers and Danny Clinch (award winning photographer) played harmonica in that band , so I asked Danny to play harmonica on a track and he was like who is doing the photos and I said I hadn’t even got that far and he said ‘ I am’ , things like that occur and we went with the flow. If anything it’s a gang of guys who are really good friends who are gonna get to play together.
The album ‘Say It To My Face’ is now available to buy on Naim records
