Huey Morgan: ‘My 16-year-old self would be surprised that I’m still here’

Huey Morgan was born in August 1968 in New York City. He was arrested as a youth and joined the US Marines. After being honourably discharged, he returned to NYC, where he began DJing and formed Fun Lovin’ Criminals. The band’s first album, Come Find Yourself, went Platinum in the UK and featured the hit singles “Scooby Snacks” and “The Fun Lovin’ Criminal”.

They released a further five albums during Morgan’s time in the band and had eight UK top 40 hits. Morgan has also had a successful career as a broadcaster and has hosted his BBC Radio 6 Music show since 2008.

In his Letter to My Younger Self, Huey Morgan reflects on early struggles, lessons learnt in the Marines and family life.

I’ve just written a book about my life so I have been looking back quite a bit lately. So let’s go back to when I was 16. I was spending all of my time playing guitar during the day, and then at night, I was causing trouble with my friends on the Lower East Side of Manhattan trying to sell little bags of pot. I was aiming for a certain kind of lifestyle anyway, and all the stuff that school was kind of prepping me for was just being a tax slave. And who wants to be a fucking tax slave, right?

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My father left my mother and me when I was about seven. He just left and never looked back. So it was just my mother with me growing up. And, you know, she worked all the time, so I didn’t spend much time with her, a lot of my time was spent by myself. I was playing guitar maybe 12 hours a day. So I was doing a lot of that introspective, lonely, only-child shit. My mother is a very lovely lady, she’s a smart woman. She is a writer, and she worked for trade publications when I was growing up, so she was doing OK for herself. And, you know, I guess being a single mom trying to raise a son in the 1970s in New York City took a very special fortitude, you know. So, yeah, she’s a tough lady. I think that’s where I get a lot of my toughness from. 

I grew up really mentally depressed. A lot of the trauma that I had when I was young attached itself to this depression. So I grew up, really, with a lot of mental health struggles. And I turned inward and tried to find a way that I could make connections with people outside myself. That’s how I became a musician, because I wanted to do something without it having anything to do with my past. A musician is someone who creates things, right? To create something that you can maybe share with somebody else, who maybe will see you as an equal, or someone worthy of love or things of that nature… that’s kind of why I got into it. So, yeah, I suppose I was not a happy kid at all.

Interestingly enough, when I first started playing, I had a friend who was a little older than me, who gave me this great idea. I’d set up my guitar with a little practice amp. At first it was an acoustic but I put the radio on and I’d play to whatever song was on the radio. And once that song ended, if another song came on right after it I’d try to play that song, find the key of the song, and work out what scale they were playing in. And then if the commercial came on, I’d just switch stations and go to the next station. So it’d be a different style of music altogether. I played jazz, then salsa, the next minute hard rock, the next heavy metal, soul, jazz. So all that stuff was really informing me on being a musician when I was a really young age. And if you listen to my [BBC] 6 Music radio show, you can tell that I love all types of music. 

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The first song I wrote was called “Communication Breakdown”. I probably was about 11 or 12 and I was trying to imagine what it would be like having a girlfriend and then breaking up with her. This is really imaginative, because I had no real-world experience of women in my life, other than my mother. So I knew that women could get moody but not much more. 

I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but my 16-year-old self would be surprised that I’m still here. I spent a lot of years in very dark places mentally. It took a lot of hard work for me to see the next day a couple of times, and that sticks with me. If anything, I’d tell that teenage dude that this too shall pass. That truth is one of the things that has gotten me through a lot of things. I think I would tell him that, don’t think that this is the way it’s going to be forever. I realised I could affect my mental health with introspection and meditation, and that’s something I didn’t understand until quite recently. Growing up like that with a cloud over you, feeling that there’s no hope and that you’re unlovable, unworthy of attention and love, that’s a really hard place to be. 

Is it true that I was told it was either prison or the Marines? [Morgan was arrested driving a stolen car.] That’s an oversimplified version of it, but yeah, essentially. I was young, and the way things worked back then is that judges had a lot of leeway over juveniles and how they were put through the system. The judge asked my court-appointed lawyer what the deal was and where this guy’s father was, and I think they agreed this kid’s not a bad kid, he’s just a stupid kid with no discipline. So the judge, he was a Marine, and he said, well, if the kid can do six in the Corps, we’ll let him go. So, yeah, like I said in the song, my choice was Parris or prison, right? Parris Island, which is the Recruit Depot for the United States. 

If you talk to any former service member, they always look back on those years fondly. I think it’s because we were young, dumb and just full of it. Ready to rock. So I look back very fondly on the brotherhood aspect of it. I grew up without a family, really, without any brothers or sisters. I was an only child, so that was the first time I found a family. I found a sense of belonging, and, you know, I was a little bit crazy. I still am a little bit crazy. And in the Marine Corps, that’s not looked at as a bad thing, right? That’s the overt purpose of the Marine Corps really, to temper you into a killing machine.

I learned a few things in the Corps. There was one guy who was not a big dude. And I didn’t understand what the badges on uniforms meant at that point. I just thought he wasn’t a big guy. He was telling me to do stuff over and over again. I said, “Look, man, we could take this into the bathroom.” That was my way of saying we could fight this out. I thought I was a tough kid, so I walked into the bathroom, I turned around, he smiled at me and the next thing I realised I was on the floor looking up at him. Wow, with his boot on my neck. And I realised at that point that maybe this guy had something to teach me. This little, skinny dude with the southern accent just whupped me without really even hitting me. 

When I came out of the Marines, I came back to New York City and I was a homeless veteran who had a lot of mental health issues who was trying to start a band. And I went through this big ordeal to get to the point where I could finally make the music. And I think the ordeal is what my book’s about. And then it’s my challenges of what I went through being an addict and being depressed and having a stress disorder, and trying to navigate the music business with no manager, and then getting a huge record contract at EMI with Fun Lovin’ Criminals, marrying a mafia princess in the midst of all this, and trying to navigate the mob and the music business. It’s a good story. 

If I could go back to one moment of my life – that’s easy. The births of my two children. I was lucky to be in the operating room with my wife when both our kids were born. My son is going to turn 14 next week, and my birthday is the day before his birthday, right? And it was the greatest birthday gift anybody could have given me. And it changed me as a man to such a great extent, not in a bad way, but in a very transcendental way. And the same thing with the birth of my daughter. A lot of parents will understand this. When you have a son, it’s one thing. When you have a daughter, it’s a complete other thing. It’s almost a different dynamic. So those two times were the two most important moments of my life. 

Huey Morgan’s memoirThe Fun Lovin’ Criminal is out now (Quercus, £22).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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