Audio By Carbonatix
There’s a scene in the movie Tin Men where Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito are hanging out in a smoky, airport-type cocktail lounge filled with Baltimore suburbanites. It’s 1963, and this is the kind of place where you’d expect to be treated to a middle-aged crooner wheezing up Perry Como covers. Instead, there’s a trio of teddy boys on stage, decked out in skintight plaid suits. The act’s sweaty singer is breaking out into a ferocious soul shout and a James Brown bump ‘n’ grind. It’s against their better nature, but the conservative lounge lizards in the movie can’t help but get into the groove.
Casting the progressive pop ‘n’ soul band Fine Young Cannibals as a Camelot-era cocktail act may seem all wrong. But if you take a listen to their first album, the Cannibals’ cameo in Tin Men makes perfect sense. The 1985 self-titled debut of singer Roland Gift and erstwhile English Beats David Steele (bass) and Andy Cox (guitar) was an elegant mesh of mellow R&B, cool pop and slinky samba–the ideal soundtrack for an early-1960s happy hour.
Early FYC used nostalgia as something of a gimmick. Everything about the band–from its coordinated Temptations suits to its Motownish dance tracks–reflected its romantic, retro sensibilities. Appropriately enough, the group even swiped its name from a soapy Robert Wagner-Natalie Wood potboiler from the early Sixties called All the Fine Young Cannibals.
FYC’s debut may have made a fine album to clink martini glasses to, but its commercial potential was nil. Only one cut, “Johnny Come Home,” even whispered of the act’s disco savvy. Of course, these days the Cannibals are right up there with Expose in the lofty ranks of commercial dance bands with a Top Ten album, The Raw & The Cooked, and a couple of Billboard-bustin’ singles to its credit.
How, you might ask, did the Cannibals manage to go from Sixties-fixated R&B mini-band to pop monster? Maybe it’s the new album’s interjections of sinewy funk that did the trick. Or it could be that annoying pop ditty, “She Drives Me Crazy,” which became an inexplicable hit for the trio. You might also credit the more contemporary feel of the LP. (It’s not as if the band has completely lost its nostalgic streak, though. It’s just about impossible to listen to a track like “Tell Me What” without being overcome by a Four Tops flashback.)
Still, the most likely cause of the Cannibals’ sudden marketability is spelled R-O-L-A-N-D. The powers that be have put an MTV-friendly face on the band by pushing Gift–he of the bedroom eyes, perpetual pout and artfully ripped jeans–into the spotlight. It seems as if the brooding 28-year-old singer is constantly giving interviews, hyping his movie roles and generally thrusting his smoldering mug in the public eye nowadays.
Gift has also been enjoying veritable sex-god status, which hasn’t hurt the Cannibals’ popularity any. Ever since INXS singer Michael Hutchence suffered his tragic haircut, Gift has reigned as the pop world’s premier heartthrob. No cheesy fanzine pinup, he: Gift likes to refer to himself as a “serious sex symbol.”
If anything, Gift seems to be taking his beefcake role a little too seriously. (Maybe finding his name on Cosmopolitan’s list of the world’s ten sexiest men went to his head.) At least teen-dreams like Milli Vanilli appear to get a giddy high out of all the 14-year-old girls fawning over their impossibly pretty faces and luxurious hair extensions. Gift rarely cracks a smile.
Being typecast as the fine young stud in his few film parts hasn’t helped bring the self-admiring singer down to earth. Roland bared his, uh, gifts throughout much of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and his latest flick, Scandal.
Like another bigheaded singer, Sting, the dilettantish Gift flits pointlessly between movies and music. Gift’s film work reportedly caused ridiculous hold-ups in the recording of The Raw & The Cooked, originally slated to hit the bins in late ’87, according to British magazine The Face. The singer’s Hollywood hiatus forced Steele and Cox to occupy themselves with a side project of their own, 2 Men, a Drum Machine and a Trumpet, which released a decent house single, “Tired of Getting Pushed Around,” last year.
Evidence of the singer’s mushrooming ego is all over The Raw & The Cooked. For starters, there’s Gift’s voice, which can be strident and soulful on the LP’s dance cuts. But on ballads like “As Hard As It Is,” he affects a hollow baritone, straining so hard it sounds like he might swallow his tongue.
Gift’s pop idol stature has also effectively snuffed out much of the Cannibals’ one-time chemistry. On the first LP, the band came off like a tight little three-piece, whereas now FYC is more like Roland and his back-ups. Judging from interviews, it’s obvious that Gift isn’t a co-dependent-kind-of-guy, so maybe all this points to a solo career looming in his future.
Time was when FYC could be counted on for understated pop ‘n’ soul tunes and charming nostalgia, but now that’s all been eclipsed by Gift’s egomania. This is, after all, a man who once proudly described himself in The Face as “either very shy or a bit of a showoff, a little bastard really.”
At least the guy’s perceptive.
