Born in 1968 in New York, Huey Morgan is a musician and broadcaster. He was 18 when he joined the US marines, and after being honourably discharged, formed Fun Lovin’ Criminals. The band’s first album, Come Find Yourself – featuring the hit single Scooby Snacks – went platinum in the UK. Huey hosts a weekly BBC 6 Music show, and his memoir, The Fun Lovin’ Criminal, is out now.
I was 14 and feeling myself. I’m dressed in nylon parachute pants, a Members Only jacket, my bandana and a Van Halen necklace. On the amplifier you can see a bad graphic design of the letters “SD”, which I thought was the greatest logo of all time. It stands for Sudden Death, the name of my band.
When I was a teenager, music was a way for me to make connections. My father left my mother and me when I was about seven. It left a dark cloud over me, and writing and playing songs became a catalyst; a way to get out of myself, to derail those feelings of not being good enough.
With ADHD, you can treat it as a flaw or embrace it as a gift. I realised early on that mine came with an ability to hyperfocus. I could play guitar for seven hours straight, and once I got a four-track, I’d stay in my room for so long that Mum had to remind me to eat.
My mother was a cool lady. Once, when we were walking through Union Square, Andy Warhol came out of a building. I whispered, “Mum, that’s Andy Warhol.” He saw us and called out, “Hey, how are you doing?” as if they were old friends. And they were. Long before his fame, when he was broke and illustrating women’s shoes, my mother was writing at Seventeen magazine. He would stop by at lunchtime and she’d share half her sandwich with him.
Aside from music, I was a pain in the ass. I was trying to overcompensate for low confidence. Puberty was hitting and I started to think I was a tough guy; getting up to no good and hanging around the wrong people. In the end I was given an ultimatum: go to jail or join the marines. What was the tipping point? I was in a room with some dudes and we got caught with a bunch of stuff. While I wasn’t one of the primary guys, I was there. When I was given an opportunity to change the trajectory of my life, I jumped at it.
The men I met in the marines were crazy. I was with people from all walks of life – every ethnicity, class, personality – and with that came an education in musical genres. I learned a lot just through osmosis. Most of them were from the south and introduced me to fingerpicking and a lot of old soul music.
Music was always my safe space. But like a lot of veterans whose job it is to fight and kill, you get left with residual side effects. Finding the right method to treat PTSD took years. I had a girlfriend who was training to be a psychologist. Without my knowing it, she had started writing her doctoral dissertation on my mental health challenges after separating from the marines. I was having trouble sleeping, I was drinking too much and topping it off with a few Valium if I could get some. She introduced me to Joyce, who became my therapist.
I was apprehensive at first. I was with a different psychiatrist for a while, who put me on SSRIs to keep me from having extreme lows. But it numbed me out. I stopped taking them because I realised I was trying to dance around the heart of the matter when what I really needed was talk therapy. Joyce taught me about silence and introspection and meditation. Therapeutic tools of stillness feel like the last thing you want to reach for when you’re in fight or flight. Instead, military personnel tend to run towards the fire, which is what happened to me for a long time, and is why a lot of veterans take their own lives.
I was still getting my head together and working behind the bar in a superclub when the Fun Lovin’ Criminals formed. I loved being around these wild subcultures, and found a great bunch of people within it. Fast [Brian Leiser] and Steve [Borgovini] were making EDM, and were courageous enough to join me on my sojourn into whatever the hell the Fun Lovin’ Criminals turned out to be. Our first gig was at this big weirdo-techno night at the Limelight, packed with club kids. It could have gone sideways, but it didn’t. We used the heavy bass of dance music and repetitive sampling to lock into a groove. By the end of The King of New York, they were shouting every word right back at us.
Because of the experiences I had as a kid, and because I was a little older when Fun Lovin’ Criminals started, I wasn’t going to get gassed by some music business guy in a suit. Those sort of dudes aren’t intimidating if you’re from where I come from. I had a good sense of my own taste and confidence in what I was doing. I really didn’t mind saying no. If something was corny and stupid, the band wouldn’t do it. One radio station wouldn’t play any of our music for five years because we refused to do some summer show where they wanted us to lip-sync. The kind of attitude I had is not what the industry wants. Just look at Harry Styles: “Wear that dress, do that song – if you don’t want to we’ll just move on to the next guy.” I once wrote a song called We Are All Very Worried About You, which was partly about my mental health. The record company was very unsure, but I was like, “I don’t care.” I wasn’t about to get yanked around and spat back out again.
The gunner in the marines once told me that “courage is just doing it scared”. I still say that to myself every day, and when the band got successful, I used it as my ethos. I quickly realised that trauma and fame did not mix well together. I am very self-conscious, and had to make myself comfortable in situations that I was not necessarily comfortable in, like going to award shows or schmoozing with freaking Madonna and Donatella Versace. I’d have a couple of extra drinks to cool myself down and try to mask the anxiety with a substance. Often I would turn into my own worst enemy. How I look back at the Never Mind the Buzzcocks thing [when Morgan smashed a mug on a table in 2013] is that it was a PTSD episode. The white wine definitely didn’t help. Unfortunately it happened on TV instead of in a pub in Lewisham, and I’ve since quit drinking alcohol.
I used to be a tropical storm, and now I’m a pressure front. My beautiful wife is a big part of that change. Marrying her was one of the smartest things I ever did, and now I have a wonderful son. My mum was a lovely cat, but she worked a lot when I was a kid, and all I ever wanted was a family. Now I have one, and it’s fantastic.
I’ve dealt with a lot of what was heaped on me when I was young, and that’s the message I’d give the boy in this photo: there’s hard work ahead, but if you hold on, stop yourself from ending things, life’s going to be all right.
