Fine Young Cannibals

The 1983 split of the Beat—known exclusively as the English Beat inside the United States—arrived without warning for guitarist Dave Cox and bassist David Steele. Only a call from their accountant, meant to close the partnership’s books, revealed that vocalists Ranking Roger and Dave Wakelin had already departed to launch a new project. While those two went on to form General Public, Cox and Steele began assembling a fresh outfit. They were determined to avoid repeating the earlier band’s missteps and held only a loose idea of blending jazz and soul with the Beat’s ska foundation, plus a commitment to a commanding lead singer; beyond those points, no detailed blueprint existed.

Finding the right voice proved far more difficult than expected. After more than five hundred auditions, the pair decided to track down a singer whose previous band had once opened for the Beat. They located Roland Gift fronting the barroom R&B group the Bones, where he bore the looks of Sidney Poitier yet sang in the manner of Otis Redding. The match was exact, and they invited him to join. Gift had first trained in youth theatre as a teenager, only shifting his focus to music once punk arrived. As that scene gave way to two-tone ska and bands such as Madness and, later, the Beat itself, he added saxophone and vocals to a local ensemble.

The Fine Young Cannibals kept live shows to sporadic appearances before signing with London Records in early 1985. Their name came from a little-known 1960 film that starred Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. Refusing the label’s suggestion of a producer whose style would dominate their own, they issued a demo recording of “Johnny Come Home” as their debut single. Its rapid success cleared the way for work with sympathetic producer Robin Miller on the band’s first album, which also featured their boldly overstated reading of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” For Jonathan Demme’s film Something Wild they reached back to Gift’s punk period and recorded the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love.”

Five years passed before the second album, The Raw and the Cooked, appeared; its raw material consisted largely of songs the group had written for Barry Levinson’s Tin Men. The single “She Drives Me Crazy” reached number one around the world. Since that release the Fine Young Cannibals have stayed largely out of view. Cox and Steele have continued collaborating under assorted names, while Roland Gift’s hoped-for film career never fully materialized. The band has never formally dissolved, and speculation about reunions and new recordings has continued. Their 1996 greatest-hits collection, The Finest, included one newly recorded track, “Flame.”