FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS (New Wave/Pop-Rock)

Origin: Birmingham, UK
Years active: 1984-1992, 1996, 2000-present
Genre: New Wave, Ska, Jazz, Pop, Funk

Members:
* Roland Gift (singer)
* Andy Cox (guitarist)
* David Steele (bassist and keyboards)

Fine Young Cannibals was an English band best known for its 1989 hits "She Drives Me Crazy" and "Good Thing". Formed in Birmingham, England, by vocalist Roland Gift and former The Beat members David Steele and Andy Cox. Their name came from the 1960 film All The Fine Young Cannibals starring Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood.

The group was formed in 1984 in Birmingham, UK. When the Beat (known as the English Beat in the U.S. only) split in 1983, it came as a surprise to guitarist Dave Cox and bassist David Steele. The first time they realized that the group's vocalists, Ranking Roger and Dave Wakelin, had gone off to form a group without them was when their accountant phoned to finalize the divorce. While the defectors had formed General Public, Cox and Steele set about creating something new of their own. Apart from not wanting to repeat the mistakes the Beat made, and a vague notion of adding both jazz and soul to the Beat's ska roots (they also decided to feature a strong vocalist), there was no real master plan.

The latter proved harder than they could have imagined. More than 500 potential singers auditioned, before, despairing of finding someone, they decided to seek out a singer whose band had once supported the Beat. They found Roland Gift singing with a barroom R&B band named the Bones, looking like Sidney Poitier but sounding like Otis Redding. He was everything they had remembered; he was their man. Gift had spent his teenage years in youth theatre, until the advent of punk made music his main passion. As punk gave way to the two-tone ska which gave rise to groups like Madness and, ultimately, the Beat, Gift took up saxophone and singing in a local band.

Keeping live work down to just the occasional on-off date, the Fine Young Cannibals signed to London Records in early 1985. Their name came from an obscure 1960 film starring Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. Resisting the record company's attempts to team them up with a producer determined to make the group a product of her sound rather than theirs, the Fine Young Cannibals released a demo version of "Johnny Come Home" as their first single.

Its instant success allowed them to team up with a compatible producer, Robin Miller, for the first Fine Young Cannibals album, also containing the group's trademark overstated version of Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds." For the Johnathan Demme film Something Wild, they reached back into Gift's punk past with a version of the Buzzcocks' classic "Ever Fallen in Love." Five years later, a second album emerged, The Raw and the Cooked, the raw side made up mostly of songs the group had contributed to Barry Levinson's film Tin Men. Fine Young Cannibals appeared as the house band in the comedy Tin Men.

Their highest charting hits in the US were "She Drives Me Crazy" and "Good Thing", from the album The Raw and the Cooked. Both reached number one in the US single charts. The single "She Drives Me Crazy" was a worldwide number one hit.

Fine Young Cannibals broke up in 1992, before briefly returning to the studio in 1996 to record a new single The Flame which would complement their Greatest Hits compilation released that year.

Since then, the Fine Young Cannibals have remained elusive. Cox and Steele continue to work together under various names, while Roland Gift's hoped-for film career never quite took off. The Fine Young Cannibals have never officially broken up, and rumors of reunions and recording sessions have persisted. Their 1996 greatest hits album, The Finest, featured the newly recorded track "Flame."

Gift soon reactivated the band and toured in the 2000s as Roland Gift and the Fine Young Cannibals.



Discography

Albums:
1985 - Fine Young Cannibals U.S.: #49
1989 - The Raw & the Cooked U.S.: #1 (7 weeks) U.S. sales: 2x platinum
1990 - The Raw and the Remix (collection of remixes of The Raw and the Cooked)
1996 - The Finest
2006 - The Platinum Collection

Singles:
1985 "Johnny Come Home" UK#8, US#76
1985 "Blue" UK#41
1986 "Suspicious Minds" UK#8
1986 "Funny How Love Is" UK#58
1987 "Ever Fallen In Love?" UK#9
1989 "She Drives Me Crazy" UK#5, US#1
1989 "Good Thing" UK#7, US#1
1989 "Don't Look Back" UK#34, US#11
1989 "I'm Not The Man I Used To Be" UK#20, US#54
1990 "I'm Not Satisfied" UK#46, US#90
1996 "The Flame" UK#17
1997 "She Drives Me Crazy (1997)" UK#36