Last night I went to see the Fun Lovin’ Criminals… at least I thought I had. They had their name spelled out in huge letters across the stages But their main man, Huey, was no longer in the band.
Embarrassingly, my friends and I didn’t notice his absence because FLC sounded the same as when we last saw them, about a decade ago, and we’d had a long day, drinking since our traditional pre-match pints before the Arsenal game.
But I’m not sure how we missed it. Not least because I have spent some time with Huey in work-related matters.
The first was in New York, around the turn of the century, where he drove me around Brooklyn to see the streets I’d just been reading about in Jonathan Lethem’s wonderful novel The Fortress Of Solitude.
Then we went round to his bandmate Fast’s flat where Huey, who had his key, raided his stash before deciding to show me his guns. Yep, you read that right.
Next thing Huey, who used to be a Marine, is taking an AK-47 apart and putting it back together (“Lemme see, I used to be able to do this in 30 seconds”) – something I wished he’d done before smoking the world’s strongest weed.
The second occasion, in Dublin where Huey had taken ownership of a pub in Temple Bar, left me in a similarly befuddled state of mind but less terrified because it involved no assault rifles, or any other weapons.
These says I am assured he is a changed man: presenting a show on BBC 6Music, and living in Bath with his wife and two children. And, hopefully, no guns or drugs.
Shamefully, it is only after I got home from last night’s gig that I discovered Huey had left FLC a couple of years back, and has since mocked them as “a tribute band” for carrying on without him.
Which is a little unfair since they still have Fast, their original keyboard player, bass guitarist and trumpeter (and gun collector), who has taken over as lead vocalist.
They still have big Uncle Frank from Leicester behind the drums, too, and a new guitarist called Naim Cortazzi, also from Leicester, who has adopted the facial hair of Huey, and plays the same sort of guitar, creating the fairly convincing illusion that it’s still the Crims… convincing enough to fool me anyway.
To be fair, they sounded pretty much exactly the same as they always did, albeit without Huey’s wisecracking banter, and they ran through the whole of their second album 100% Colombian from start to finish before coming back to do some old favourites.
They gave us their signature song, The Fun Lovin’ Criminal, obviously, and even more obviously their biggest song, Scooby Snacks. But somehow they didn’t do this, arguably their best song – the tale of a wannabe gangster called Frankie who wants to break the Gambino family boss John Gotti out of jail.