Good Work Felon

Loaded – August 1998

They're a little bit 'whoo', a little bit 'wahey', they're a little bit tasty… they're the Fun Lovin' Criminals in New York

The club is called Varuke. It is, or was five weeks ago, the hippest club in New York for no other reason than it is, or was. On the first night, Leonardo Di Caprio is outside talking to the bouncers while easting a sandwich with a crash helmet help-on/half-off his head. On the second night Marky Mark breaks the North American oestrogen (in an enclosed space) record by some distance, just by loitering in the bar and flirting with women so glamourous that in any normal incarnation his only contact with them would be cleaning their windscreens at the traffic lights. "It's named after Varuke Salt," explains the man on the door like he might be explaining the financial intricacies of the Whitewater Scandal to an ethnic Albanian. "You know," he smiles, "like in Willy Wonka?" "Do you know what a verucca is?" I ask him, making conversation.
"Yeah man, like I said, the kid from Willy Wonka, the girl who disappears down the chute… or is it the one who falls in the chocolate river? No, no… that's the fat German kid, what's his name?"
"Augustus Gloop?"
"Yeah man, you knoe the film… Varuke Salt."
"A verruca, v-e-r-r-u-c-a, is a type of wart commonly found on the foot."
"Really?"
"Yes, really. Perhaps you should consider constructing a small pool full of disinfectant as is commonly found in public swimming baths in the United Kingdom. You could put it just outside the front door."
"Yeah, that's a great idea, man. What is it again? A wart?"

"People in England seem to have a sense of homour about the way life is," smirks Huey, lead singer of the Fun Lovin' Criminals, as he spells out the reasons why his band are platinum over here and not even gold over there. We're sat in the garden at the Bowery Bar, a model and money hang-out ("It's like Argentina man, they don't let the ugly women in") with a guest list like the funeral of the Princess of Wales and waiters on placement from the Amnesiac Society of America. "In the US people like to think we can change lifestyles by the decade but it's all crap, it's just the old Hollywood syndrome… if you go to LA there's nothing more than a 100 years old, there's nothing with a link to the past, no tradition of any sort, and without that you lose perspective of where you came from so you're always thinking you can improve upon things.

"England's been around a damn long time and people there understand how shit is because their grandfather told them about it, it's been passed down the ages. And with that comes a great sense of humour because you know shit doesn't change that much, it's still relative. People got the joke and that's where we come from… this bar is a little different from where I come from, a few too many high heels and so forth but where I come from we had to find the humour, and that's what we got in common with people who understand how life is. There are people in the US who know but there are also a lot who think that MTV is some kind of organised religion, it's kinda weird…" he sighs. Unless otherwise indicated, a burst of three consecutive full-stops in a qoute from Huey is shorthand for a blast of skunk so powerful that birds are already starting to fall out of the trees.

"It's like," he continues, "it's like no one's thinking about themselves but just how they are perceived, sometimes it seems as though everyone's just for show, not got anything really going on…" A guide dog on the other side of the fence inhales at the wrong time and bolts across East 4^th Street on a 'Don't Walk' sign. "It's upsetting man. There's no art in it, it's just like everyone's out to make money." On cue, a party of six young men with no arses, plucked eyebrows and voices camp enough to make Julian Clary sound like Joe Cocker mince over and effect some kind of possibly non-legimate commerical transaction that involves handing over of small packets in exchange for hard currency. The Fun Lovin' Criminal takes a blast and pulls the 'you-talkin'-to-me' face from Taxi Driver.

The face is as natural to New Yorkers as wearing shit shoes is to the French. In normal circumstances it means anything from "what are you talking about?" to "I hope you're aware that you've just entered a world of trouble". On this occasion, melted as it is by borderline cannabis narcosis, it merely means, "You see what I mean?"

"For me, grass is more like demon suppression that getting through it. It's a hectic world, man, but I'm not a man for Prozac or anything like that, so I like to self-medicate, we're still working alright. There is a lot of cocaine in the music business," he adds, unnecessarily. "I don't do it, but it's not a moral thing… it was never something I thought was cool, granted the girlies love it but I can't be bothered with that kind of stuff… it doesn't do good for me. I'm not a good person with that kind of stuff… What year is it? 1998. Well, it's eight years since I touched it but it's everywhere.

"If I ever wanted to go out on a binge, then God bless, it'd all be over. I just, you know [long pause]… when I was a kid, that's how I got in the Marines, I was doing a little selling of that kind of stuff, I got pinched, one thing led to another and I ended up in the Marines." This is the first time he's revealed why, in 1990, he was given the option of a custodial sentence or active service. That period in uniform, however, dovetailed rather unfortunately with the Gulf War. "When you're a kid growing up, you always want to travel," he says. "You get to travel in the services but it is always under a bad pretext. I don't regret joining the Marines, you know, given the options it seemed like a logical choice. I was in for a little while [pause]…

"I tell you what though, I don't want to talk about the Marines, but that shit's still so close to home that when I go out drinking and start thinking about the Marines, they weren't all good times, and I get all melancholy and I'm still like that… that's why I get a bit weird, I was in two and-a-half years and…" The sentence drifts off. The future of this interview is not exploiting Gulf War Syndrome for quotes in big letters. "It's fucking crazy man, for 27 years of my life nobody gave a fuck what I had to say, now they're flying you guys over from England to ask me about this and that…" It's a tactical withdrawal we both accept. Later in the night he volunteers an anecdote about parachuting into an operation in pitch dark and mis-timing the point he should have released his harness. He broke his feet. He smiles at the memory, it's one of the better ones.

The inside of a Lincoln six-seater limousine is designed for comfort. It's also designed for six people. We pack it like a football team car-jacking a minicab after hours. It's the transportation for the night. There's just room for one more, drummer Steve-o (pronounced like Hawaii Five-O), the Fun Lovin' Criminal who was arrested in Leeds last year for making obscene phone calls to a ladies gym. The Sun, with unerring inaccuracy, described it thus: "Stephen Borovine, 29, is suspected of making several obscene and threatening calls to Asian women at gyms while the New York band has been touring in Britain." An accusation he totally rejects. The police too him into custody at Bridewell police station and kept him overnight, just long enough so that the next day's gig in Manchester was in jeopardy until the last minute. On his release (with a reprimand) a car picked him up and tonned it down the outside lane of the M62. He arrived just in time to walk on stage.

"When he got out of that shit, the first thing he said was, "Have you got a cigarette?" We were like, "Here you go Steve, let's go do the show." He does what he does," shrugs Huey. "So fucking what, you can't really say nothing to him… We played that night and we've got a lot of people in Manchester and they all came out, it was a crazy night. At the next gig in Brighton we were egging the crowd on to start singing, 'You dirty bastard, you dirty bastard…' That's just great man, that's rock'n'roll, we always wanted a drummer that wasn't quite right… You'd have to ask Steve-o about it but what I know is that he went and asked for a rub down and the woman took it the wrong way, he wanted a message and she was like, 'a rub down?' and freaked. He just went, 'Oh fuck you"' He didn't know the vernacular…"

"And the coppers bought that?"

"Believe me, the coppers will buy anything man."

Steve-o slides into the limo on the back seat. For the record, he seems to be quite a presentable young man, courteous and charming and with very clean finger nails.

Back at the Bowery, two young ladies saunter past checking out the rock star and the fat journalist with acute shaving rash. I note that, peculiarly, one of them is walking like she is chewing a toffee in her arse. Huey (second name withheld by request) is single. And about to go on a world tour with a rock band. He will, I speculate, probably end up gettting some. "I was with a girl for five years up until a month ago and, you know,  I was not looking. I was very happy where I was but I know Fast [the bass player] has a really hot girlfriend  who's a singer in a rock band [Saffron from Republica] and I'm sure being in a rock band helped him with that but now she's got to know him I'm sure it's love… I've looked up recently though and there are some fine ladies around." Given the environment, a gratuitous remark of wanton understatement.

The Fun Lovin'Criminals sold more copies of their first album, Come Find Yourself, in New York than in any other American city (about 100,000) but can still drink where they like in their home town without interference from star-fuckers and stalkers. Although that might be about to change. "It's weird," whispers Huey. "I was talking to my friend Mike before and he goes: 'That guy's walking by and looking at you every time he walks by,' and I say, 'I don't mean to be all like "Yo I'm in a band" and everything, but maybe the guy knows me from the band because we've played around here a lot. I've been in New York for 27 years and if anybody looks at you more than two times while you're sitting here something's up, you've got to get out… so it's like that. I'm not used to it…" That will also change.

Pressed to isolate the moment when he realised his band had arrived, he doesn't hesitate for a second. "I'll tell you exactly when it was. We were playing with U2 and travelling between venues, and as their plane was taking off I was smoking a joint in the aisle…" He delivers what is popularly known as a shit-eating grin. "It was like a 727, a fucking proper jet plane. That was cool man, you call it as you see it. I don't know them through other people I only know what I know of them and they were cool with us, we felt like we went to our rich cousin's house and they let us fuck around. You know, they didn't say 'stay out of that, stay out of that'. We could do whatever we liked and we were running about in their back yard. They got us each a stereo that we can take on tour and we'll be rocking some hotels in their honour, God bless 'em…. We're going to get thrown out the Metropolitan."

If they don't get thrown out of the country first. The new album, 100% Columbian (a reference, he insists, to dope not cocaine), is out in late summer. "The first album was like we were Charlie and had been given the keys to the Chocolate Factory and it was like 'Oh no…' because that's some funny shit, one minute you're a scumbag working in a club, you do some half-assed show and some guy from a record company goes 'do you wanna make a record?' Because that's pretty much how it was… Now with the second record Charlie's down with the Oompah Loompahs, he knows where the fudge goes, we're all just starting to realise there's a bit more to making music than all this." This is the album they hope America is going to get. "It's pretty much the best we could give the people, man. I think the reason a lot of people like our band is because they know it's not a record company thing, we produce it, we mix it, we master it… it's righteous man, it comes directly from us."

Huey has a dog called Sugar. It's a mixture of Rottweiler, pit bull and some even meaner breeds. It looks like a canine Mike Tyson but is, apparently, "really sweet". Sat on the roof of it's owner's apartment, overlooking a flat shared by a lesbian couple employed respectively by the District Attorney's office and the NYPD ("They don't mind nothing man, they've seen a lot of ills and know the place of a little reefer…"), Sugar watches the traffic pass along 8^th Street while 'Jimmy the neighbourhood psycho' walks the same section of pavement he has done for at least the last 15 years, crossing the road only as the sun goes down behind the tenements and water-coolers. The apartment itself is all burnished wood floors, commodious leather sofa and a stereo with speakers the size of industrial freezer units. On another roof terrace Huey is cultivating a crop of 'ghetto fern'. It is the perfect laid-back urban setting for the music he makes.

"The way I look at it," he says as he plays us the new album and loads a fistful of spliffs into a cigarette packet, "is that you've always got to have a home base, and that's what New York is; I grew up here… we are lucky that the place we come from is so diverse, you know, my only complaint is with the Rollerbladers. It's not like I don't like Rollerbladers but I don't like the Rollerbladers with all the padding because they're not good enough. If you can't do it, get a tread-mill at home, do you know what I'm saying dude? Try and do it where you're not hurting people… but I'm happy where I am, I'm doing alright, I love my house… I'll be here in five years and happy. For Chrissakes, my cleaner even collects my roaches and outs them in an ashtray for me." And he pulls the face from Taxi Driver again. This time it means, 'how can it get any better?'

Article by Bill Borrows