Funk Soul Brothers
Rock Sound - March 2001 (Issue 22) FLC's: a simple case of style over substance? On the eve
of the release of their fourth album rock sound collars main man Huey to set the record straight… "Believe me, if all that
'coolest man in rock' shit pissed you off, imagine how I feel!" pleads Huey. "The last thing anyone, especially in Britain, wants to talk about with us is the music. It's like our shirts are more important
that our songs. If I hadn't heard us, only read about us, I'd be suspicious to say the least."You laugh and carry on this disarmingly honest conversation you're having (most interviews veer between agonised
monosyllabicism and duplicitous sycophancy) and you wonder if you're getting suckered by the myth or finally coming face to face with the real deal behind it all. It's just that every single Fun Lovin' Criminals
interview I've ever read starts out from the same point: i.e. I'm a sad-sack journalist twat with a shit cardigan on, this band are cool in a way I'll never come close to, I'm gonna ask them how to be cool.
And then before you know it we're off into asking Huey his style-tips on a million different irrelevant questions of personal whim and the music comes a poor second to stories of Tijuana whores and cocktails and golf on
the beech and the borrowed sub-ratpack chic of movies you've grown out of. Well, fuck it, I dress well that you very much and I could see 'Come Find Yourself' and '100% Columbian' for what they were: impeccably
sourced strangely joyless indexes of pastiched greatness. FLC came to resemble something like The Blues Brothers for a Reservoir Dogs generation, a trip through a damn fine record collection that never became more
than its roots. What 'Mimosa' signalled was a genuine shift, a dropping of the more facile stylistic distractions and a true fusion of form and content positing a genuinely alternate pop universe. 'Loco',
the bands fourth and newest album marks an even more glorious transformation, one that's made any mothering objections I might've had look like the repellent elitism they most assuredly were. It's a stunning
hour-long suite of funk, country, pop, punk, soul, blues and hip-hop that's never self-conscious, always simply spun out on the sheer gorgeous textures of all that frantically detailed sound and the physical boomph of
it's lo-end ooze. It's a masterpiece. I'll admit it. Fuck, don't ya hate being wrong? GANGSTA RAP
"Thanks for admitting it," grins Huey, who along with Fast, DJ Matteo and drummer Steve [or more correctly, Mackie! - Locoweb]
, is preparing in New York for the ensuing worldwide tour after the release of 'Loco'. "Thing is, we never really change the process
of FLC; all that changes is what we feed in and how good we are at bringing it out. I think we've got better all the time," says Huey. "With this album it was really a case of bringing together all the things
we've done before, the attitude of the first album, the song writing of the second album, and the attention to sound of 'Mimosa'. This near to the release, you start really thinking about how it's gonna get
received, whether the fans will hate it or love it. I think it's the best thing we've done, I just don't wanna jinx it." What makes 'Loco' and FLC stand out even more given the last two years since '100%
Columbian' is that since we last heard from you mixing hip-hop and rock has become, how can we put it? The single most tedious formation in pop. Yeah, that'll do."Tell me about it. Well, I think
anyone who knows what we do, knows we have nothing to do with that. We've always just done what we do: what you're talking about with all of that shit is a lot of kids who got into hip-hop through
rock. I think that's just about the worst way to learn about hip-hop, it immediately ties you in with a very limited view of what hip-hop's about. The people who are into us usually have just as wide a
musical taste as we do, and that doesn't just mean having the odd gangsta LP tucked away, it means listening to real funk, not just what's happened in the past decade. Those rap-rock bands bore me deeply – all I
can hear is the same emotion repeated over like a brick in the face. There's no variety, no real musicianship, just lots of technical virtuosity and no soul. And the lyrics, god they're just
embarrassing. The most interesting lyrical poetic form of the last century ends with people stealing it so that they can say how they want to smack you in the face, screw underage girls, beat their girlfriends up
and bitch about their mothers and how horrible their childhoods were. They need spanking and putting to bed." GOING LOCO If you've gotta play join the dots, ignore the pimp-rock poltroons
and think of the real groovy genius coming from the States right now; file 'Loco' next to D'Angelo's 'Voodoo' and Outkast's 'Stankonia' as a living breathing example of how the gamy stench of the funk can survive a
digitalised, deodorized age. "I'd go along with that, in that I love both those albums and listening to them you can tell that these are guys who know their shit. The feeling I get with a lot of bands now is
that they seem just totally bereft of musical knowledge with any depth to it. It's ever bothered me if our fans do or don't go back to our influences to check where we're coming from, I think they're all into that
shit anyway. I like records that make you wanna listen to a dozen other records as soon as they've finished. What did 'Loco' make you wanna listen to? Eric B & Rakim, Donny Hathaway, Erykah Badu,
Steely Dan… "Cool, the thing is, if rap-rock as we all know is founded on a false dichotomy the we're screwed as a band cos we don't subscribe to all that neat categorisation. For us music is way more
complex than being able to simply stitch it together. It's all about emotional links across the tracks, between races, across time. The weird thing is the worse the music industry has got the more ambitious
we've become. We didn't exactly start out in '96 with this innocent gleam in our eyes but we have become more cynical about it the more we've encountered it. "So on the album 'The Biz' is written from that
perspective, that totally antagonistic angle. For FLC we ant the best though, we want to be bigger, huge, because we'll stand out so much more as things get so much worse!!" WILD WEST So
would you say that you aren't interested in much modern music anymore? "No, not at all! There's lots of stuff I love, lots of things still to investigate. It's just that there are a lot of bands
now. Not a lot of shit bands. Really bad bands are okay. You can laugh at them and they go away. No, the problem at the moment is that there's an infinite amount of very average bands. And
record companies are willing to spend as much money as they need to make these bands sound professional. So you end up with a million mediocre state-of-the-art albums without an ounce of difference between any of
them." So did you get any flak from The Man when you turned up with an album with a few country and western tunes on it? "Nahh! That's gonna be the bullshit about this album. That just cos I've
done a couple of songs with those kinds of touches. It's another change in direction for us. As far as I'm concerned FLC aren't limited to anything other than what we can do well. What we're interested
in is making great American music, no matter what that sounds like, or wherever it fits in the scheme of things. I can't believe we haven't done country before. It strikes me when people pick up on things
like that, just how rigid some guys are about music. For us, we make the music we want to hear because very few other people working today are making the music we want to hear. Simply put, people are way too
scared of music at the moment, nobody's got the guts to fuck with it anymore. Things are way too polite." Damn right, 'Loco' blows every single taste hierarchy apart every second it's on. It's surreal
to say it about a band so often portrayed as ironic funsters, but FLC could be the great American band they always said they were. CIRCUS LIFE In which case, how come you're much
bigger over here than you are over there? "Because the attention we get over in Europe has always been way out of sync with how many records we actually sell. I'm cool with being popular in Europe, we've
been popular in Europe when we haven't even had a distribution deal over in the States. S'good enough for Miles Davis, s'good enough for me. We were in danger of becoming a tabloid proposition at one point
in the UK. Every time I go to England I know that the first thing we're gonna get asked about is who or what we did last night and whether we would mind repeating it all for the cameras today. That said, I'm
looking forward to the whole media circus kicking off again. We've built a thirst for it after being away for a while." How do FLC prepare to go out on the road? "Like we have done, by remaining
horizontal most of the time. We've been hangin' out in New York and Hawaii writing songs and partying. We recorded the album taking it easy after we finished an 18-month tour. But we're hard workers on
the music if not the business side, so we weren't going to wait around for it to et warm before coming back to Europe. I still think there's a better attitude to music in Europe than in the States."
Why? "Music used to be this thing that was free and it was up to the industry to figure out how to market it" he says. "Now the industry actually guides everything through, from the beginning: The
sound, the look, the demographic, the market share, everything, all that money-hungry shit. People seem to still have this romantic notion of record companies of homes of creativity, these big buildings with lots
of money still willing to give it up to whatever band of wasters comes through the door. The fact is, no-one dares take a risk anymore: If a company's gonna back a band they're gonna make damn sure that
nothing is left to chance, nothing can go wrong. So you get the stylist and the manager and the PR and the bullshit that goes with it and somewhere, down at the bottom of the priority list, is the music. The
music is simply the soundtrack to the product. That's the way a lot of American sound comes about nowadays. We've seen it all happen. And we're determined to kick against that bullshit with all our
strength. That's why I can't wait to get back on the road again, 'cos playing every night, and seeing people get into it, just reaffirms your faith in humanity. That's what music should be all about."
Absolutely. A true gent. And I never thought I'd say that. Keep getting surprised by 'Loco' all Spring. The future of good music just might depend on it. Words by Neil Kulkarni
another article meticulously typed up by Wenders |