Fine Young Cannibals: Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth
Roland gift and David Steele are walking down a street in a gray, mostly industrial section of north London. A car drives by, and the woman at the wheel looks at Gift and waves. He grins and waves back.
Steele stares at the car as it drives away, then looks back at his partner. ”Who was that?” he asks, puzzled. Gift stops in his tracks and looks confused. ”I don’t know,” he says, finally. ”I guess I still think that if somebody waves at you, they must know you.” He shakes his head. ”I keep forgetting that maybe they just recognize me.”
These days, lots of people recognize Roland gift, and his two colleagues also. Gift, David Steele and Andy Cox are Fine Young Cannibals, and Fine Young Cannibals are the latest group of Brits to conquer the American charts. After a modestly successful first album and three years of silence, they came back with two Number One singles (”She Drives Me Crazy” and ”Good Thing”), a third contender (”Don’t Look Back”) and an album — The Raw and the Cooked — that has monopolized the Number One album slot for most of the summer.
Fine Young Cannibals are not sure how to explain it, really. Steele thinks it’s partly because of their unusual look: two skinny, pale white guys, with their hair cut very short on the sides and longer on top, and a strikingly handsome black man. Cox says, ”Every year there’s one British group that does well in America, isn’t there? You pull on the handle, and this year it’s three lemons and us.” And they all thought that their music — soul-based pop written by musicians reared on punk and ska and as fond of De la Soul as they were of Otis Redding — crossed enough barriers that either no radio station would play it or every station would.
This year, every station has. The Raw and the Cooked is smart dance pop with an edge — an album that uses three decades of soul music to inform and invigorate basic pop songs. Far more assured than the band’s debut, the record adroitly works a middle ground between the spare funk of Prince (a major influence on ”She Drives Mc Crazy”) and the drive of Sixties R&B (which surfaces in ”Don’t Look Back”). What sells the record, though, are insanely catchy melodies, inventive arrangements and Gift’s fluttery, almost freakish voice.
And so Fine Young Cannibals are about to take it on the road. They don’t much like to tour, but after months of what they call ”stupid fucking meetings,” they performed on Saturday Night Live and remembered how much they enjoyed playing live. They’ll do a quick one: four weeks in the United States, a handful of shows in Great Britain, apologies to the rest of the world. So they’ve been getting together in London, rehearsing their sixteen-piece band and sweating the details.
And now Roland Gift, the most recognizable Cannibal, the voice and the look in the spotlight, puts down the telephone and turns to his band mates in a north-London photo studio. ”They want to know,” says Gift to the others, ”if we’re willing to share a dressing room.”
Steele and Cox look confused. ”Share it with who?” asks Steele.
”Ourselves,” says Gift.
”Where?”
“‘On the tour.”
Cox frowns. ”That’s bizarre,” he mutters, baffled that anybody would think they’d want separate dressing rooms.
”I dunno,” says Gift with a laugh. ”Maybe somebody’s leaked some stories.”
This, to be sure, is a band with an odd dynamic. When the group was formed, Steele and Cox were the ones with a track record; since then Gift has captured most of the attention. In the hiatus between albums, Steele, 29, and Cox, 33, worked behind the scenes producing acts like the Wee Papa Girls and Pop Will Eat Itself and recording a British dance hit as 2 Men, a Drum Machine and a Trumpet; Gift, 28, meanwhile, was highly visible, acting in the films Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Scandal. Steele and Cox are sardonic and cynical, with a reputation for being uncooperative; Gift is a self-described optimist who says he doesn’t mind doing promotion. Steele and Cox aren’t always the most cordial of companions, but they can be open and frank in interviews; Gift is a pleasant conversationalist who always seems to be holding something back. Steele and Cox both live in Tooting, a town in south London; Gift lives in Islington, just north of the City, London’s financial center. Add it up, they know, and it’s enough to start people asking questions.