Well, at least they weren't those disrespectful, ungrateful young cannibals that you see roaming the streets at all odd hours, besmirching the good reputation of our town. No siree. Nothing but fine, upstanding, proper young cannibals in this band.
If someone had taken a poll, back around 1983 or so, asking close followers of the British Ska Revival who they might have thought, out of all the musicians involved, would form the nucleus of a spin-off group that would eventually release a massive US #1 album in 1989 that would feature two massive US #1 singles, I doubt many of those responding would have answered, "Well, the bassist and the guitarist from the English Beat, obviously."
One might have put some money on Graham "Suggs" McPherson, lead singer of Madness, a band that, unlike the English Beat, actually scored a US top 10 hit. It probably wouldn't have been a terrible stretch to envision Terry Hall and his Sideshow Bob haircut making a more forceful appearance on the American charts in one form or another, be it with the Fun Boy Three, a new line-up of the Specials, or some other off-the-wall side project yet to be conceived. If you'd have said English Beat lead vocalist Dave Wakeling and his toasting sidekick Ranking Roger, you would have been in the ballpark at least, as they went on to form General Public, something of a punk/ska supergroup (featuring members of the Clash, the Specials, and Dexys Midnight Runners!), which scored a US #27 hit with "Tenderness."
The top 30. Right. That's about what you'd expect from an English Beat side project. Well, Andy Cox and David Steele were, shall we say ... "hungry" for more. But just who were they going to find to assist them with devouring all that succulent human flesh?
Roland Gift has a singing style so choked and so pinched, he makes Robin Gibb sound like Tom Jones. If I'm in a less charitable mood, I might describe him as one of those singers who - Thom Yorke is another for me - equates "poor pronunciation" with "emotion" and "passion." Look, Sam Cooke didn't have to mumble and gurgle to sound soulful, you know? Let's just say that if I didn't like so many of the other elements in the Fine Young Cannibals' sound, Gift's idiosyncratic style might get on my nerves a bit more. As it is, I can roll with his Mick Jagger-circa-1981 vocal affectations.
Between 1990 and 2010, I always chuckled a bit whenever I thought about The Raw & the Cooked, because for about a year it must have seemed like the Fine Young Cannibals were going to be the biggest thing ever, and then POOF! - they vanished into the woods like a Donner Party casualty. "Ha ha ha," I thought to myself. "Can you believe all those people who got so excited about the Fine Young Cannibals?? Man, people are so clueless." Then, sometime around 2011, I actually listened to the album. You know what? I probably would have gotten excited about the Fine Young Cannibals too.
In all my years of '80s music fandom, I don't know if I've ever heard anything quite like it. Wikipedia lists the album's genre as "alternative rock/new wave/soul/dance-rock"; AMG's Jo-Anne Greene likewise refers to a "shopping list of genres" such as "Mod, funk, Motown, British beat, R&B, punk, rock, and even disco..." I mean hell, why not just throw in a steel guitar and cross country and western off the list too? But I don't think the album (which, to clarify, was actually the band's second) comes off like one of those intentionally eclectic Prince/Beck-style genre-hopping exercises. It just sounds like a bunch of British guys goofing around and making the kind of music they've always secretly been into. As a means for established new wave musicians to try a little something different in a low-key, unambitious way, without much in the way of heavy critical or commercial expectations, the Fine Young Cannibals remind me of the Tom Tom Club or the Power Station. And those Tom Tom Club and Power Station albums turned out pretty good!
For instance: In the Wacky and Yet Surprisingly Awesome Cover Version Hall of Fame, I think FYC's remake of the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love" might deserve its own wing (right next to Judas Priest's remake of "Diamonds and Rust" and Scissor Sisters' version of "Comfortably Numb"). It swings, it grooves, it shimmies, it shakes - makes me wonder what they could've done with "New Rose," "White Riot," or "12 X U," you know?
While the jangly "Don't Look Back" was the album's third most successful US single, I would place the third and fourth tracks, "I'm Not the Man I Used to Be" and "I'm Not Satisfied," only a notch or two behind the mega-hits on the enjoyment scale. If a couple of cuts seem to tread water, at least they're slotted towards the end of the album where I don't really notice them. At 35 minutes, The Raw & The Cooked is short and sweet and doesn't strain for unnecessary significance.
So, the two big hits. They were hits, they were big, and you know why. On "She Drives Me Crazy," Gift really emits that "three-year-old toddler" sex appeal; at times I get the impression that he needs a quick diaper change. On the borderline incomprehensible verses, he kind of sounds like a painfully shy schoolgirl forced to give a book report in front of the entire class. I used to think he sang, "She drives me crazy/And no one cares." Yes, you're right! No one cares about this stupid crush you have, Roland. But damn, what a snare sound. Honestly, until I read the album's Wikipedia page, I had no idea just how much thought and energy went into that one simple effect:
...the unique snare drum "pop" sound on "She Drives Me Crazy" was created by [producer David] Z recording the snare drum portion separately. A speaker was then placed on top of the snare drum, and a microphone below. The original recording of the snare drum part was played back through the speaker and re-recorded. Reflecting on creating the snare sound with Mix Online in 2001, David Z said: "I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone. As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1 kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with." Dan Daley of the website added:Personally, I would have increased the lower end on the Shure 57, ran the echo through an Ampex 236, not a 456, and placed the microphone behind an EK-XG with anti-reverb limiter, but that's just me. I guess it still came out sounding pretty good regardless. The deliberately artificial percussion pushes the song into dance-pop territory, but the roaring guitar pushes it right back into rock, and the whole track is like a giant see-saw between these two impulses, and in the end, I think we all came out the winners in this battle.
But the coup de grace for the sound was when Z pumped the processed and blended sample through an Auratone speaker set upside down atop another snare drum, which rattled the metal snares and gave the result some ambience and even more high end. The whole thing was limited slightly and then sent to a track on a roll of Ampex 456 running on a Studer A800 at 15 ips. Only a slight amount of reverb was added to the track later on. The sonic result was closer to a hollow wood block sound than any snare found on a conventional rock record...
As white British '80s Motown homages go, "Good Thing" just might give "Town Called Malice" and "High Fidelity" a run for its money. The opening guitar strum kicks things off like a gun at a race track, and the bridge, with its "whoo-hoo-hoo" backing vocals, sounds like Holland-Dozier-Holland snorting Smokey Robinson's coke with Norman Whitfield rolling up the bills. But how many Motown singles sported a boogie woogie piano solo as hot as this one's? Small epiphany: I just realized that the sound at 2:05 is not, as I had assumed for years, a saxophone playing exactly two notes, but Roland Gift singing "Waaah-haaah." The man could have had a second career as a saxophone impersonator. His closing "Good gaaah! Gooh!" suggests an attack of involuntary esophagospasms, but the backing vocalists don't sound the least bit concerned (and the video is like an extended three-minute riff on the Quadrophenia album cover).
So then what the hell happened? Why did an album that hit such an artistic and commercial sweet spot become Gift, Cox, and Steele's last meal? From Wikipedia:
The band's record label and manager had never previously experienced success the size of The Raw & the Cooked, and "they didn't know how to handle it." In the words of Gift, "they kept saying to us our next record had to be even bigger which was really stupid. That was one of the main things that killed it for me." As such, the band never recorded a follow up album, and after a hiatus that began in 1992, their first and only song recorded and released after the album was "The Flame" for their 1996 compilation album The Finest, and they subsequently disbanded. Gift said "We just stopped wanting to do it. You might wake up one day and think 'I'm out' but you don't realise it's been at the back of your mind for a while. It was hard to stick to how we appraised the band originally, which was to make great music."
Well, sometimes even the most ravenous cannibals simply lose their taste for carrion.
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