Bag Of Hits - 15 Interglobal Chartstoppers

Et tu General Public?

Forget the Ides of March; beware of fair-weather freres. Funny how the tastemakers backed off from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals once their retail figures started to waver, discarding them like a pair of gaudy Italian shoes bought in the heat of the late ’90s sales rush, embarrassed at having been taken in by that smooth talkin’ Huey and his second storey men with their lounge-funk sleight of hand and slick card tricks and yellow pack Scorsese shtick.

But anyone with a lick of sense knows it’s a shtick. That’s the whole point. FLC was always more Cheech & Chong than Goodfellas. The mistake they made was to assume everyone was in on the joke.

Musically the band were always too hybrid for US radio, hitching white trash rock with bastardised rap, Bo Diddley with Barry White, the rough with the smooth. Although not allergic to a radical remix like those performed by Stephen Lironi or Garbage (the extra CD is a side-order I didn’t order, but it does yield a couple of peaches), they are largely technophobes with a prevailing love of songcraft by way of the rat pack, a groove-driven playing band coveting the chops of say, BB King or Santana (‘Loco’), and one of the few power trios who could introduce Tom Petty and Lynyrd Skynyrd to Grandmaster Flash and the Sugarhill Gang.

Such eclecticism can be mistaken for dilettantism, the whiff of the ersatz, but at their best – ‘Scooby Snacks’, ‘Big Night Out’, ‘Korean Bodega’ – FLC provide the comedy take on Lou’s New York by way of seminal rap-rock crossbreeds like Big Audio Dynamite. And look at some of the stuff Huey Morgan was doing as a songwriter, one of the few hard chaws (faux or no) to address how clubland can cure a homophobe (“I met the finest girl of my life that night/At gay night” – ‘Bump’).

Screw the lotta yez, I loved ’em when they couldn’t get arrested, and I love ’em now, even if they can’t get arrested again.