The multi platinum funk soul brothers, with 4 Top 10 albums to their name, return for the first time in five years, with the first classic, fantastic party album of the decade, featuring collaborations with Roots Manuva and Paul Kaye.
Huey, Fast and Frank have been missing in action for 5 years caught up in an acrimonious legal battle with their first manager who they fired in 2003. ‘Classic Fantastic’ bursts out of that gloom like a glorious sunrise shooting infinite rays over a range of shadowy mountains, as spectacularly life-affirming as the last five years have been creatively death-defying.
Formed in New York in 1993, FLC gate-crashed the euphoric Britpop party in 1996 and brought along some unexpectedly unique swag, the generational classic album ‘Come Find Yourself’ which gave us the cackling refrain “stick ‘em up punk, it's the Fun Lovin Criminal” and the Pulp Fiction–sampling ‘Scooby Snacks’. The mid-to late 90s was a twirling martini cocktail of world travel, acclaim and phenomenal album sales.
Like The Killers and Kings of Leon today, the UK loved them first, the most; whip-smart story-tellers in smarter Savile Row suits, who told vibrant, satirical, comically tall tales of living large in the neon metropolis via music, drugs, crime and existential ennui. With a penchant for a beautiful “lady”.
During their five-year hiatus, the three brothers Crim found other creative outlets, most notably Huey, who is fast becoming one of the UK’s most charismatic TV and radio personalities. He hosts award-winning ‘The Huey Show’ on BBC6 Radio in London, whilst on MTV he presents a boy racer series called ‘Slips’.
The trio, now all relocated to the UK, have left the cartoon New York netherworld behind for a colossal outdoors party, creating a self-produced summertime classic recorded in their London studio and featuring life-long “fourth member”, the Grammy-award winning hip-hop engineer Tim Latham (A Tribe Called Quest, De le Soul, KRS-One – and Britney Spears). The songs tell stories, notes Huey, “about the human condition”; from the bonkers psychedelic party-rock of ‘Mars’ (like OutKast never went away), to the sumptuous, summertime, trumpeting soul of ‘Classic Fantastic’. Summer shimmers on via the irresistible, piano-led, De la Soul-goes-Latino-carnival of ‘She Sings At The Sun’, there’s the comedy skit ‘Conversations With Our Attorney’ featuring “Mike Strutter”, Paul Kaye’s outrageous MTV character. More bedlam-rock meltdown follows with ‘The Originals’ before ‘Keep On Yellin’, featuring Roots Manuva.
A party album built in a psychological bunker; it’s a phenomenal testament to the power of unbound optimism. “There’s this thing called Noetics,” announces Huey. “Which says if everybody thinks the same good thoughts, good things will happen. Likewise, negative thoughts - it’s not rocket science. And we all want the same thing, to be a Fun Lovin’ Criminal. You have to go through hell to get to heaven and now we’re finally out from under a lot of our problems, it’s a brand new day. So let’s go out and do what we love to do.”
Tracklisting is as follows:
- 1. Mars
- 2. Classic Fantastic
- 3. The Originals
- 4. She Sings At The Sun
- 5. Keep On Yellin’ (featuring Roots Manuva)
- 6. Jimi Choo
- 7. El Malo
- 8. Conversations With Our Attorney (featuring Paul Kaye)
- 9. We, The Three
- 10. How Low?
- 11. Mister Sun
- 12. Rewind
- 13. Get Your Coat
