When
Dave Wakeling and
Ranking Roger split from the rest of
the English Beat to form
General Public, guitarist
Andy Cox and bassist
Dave Steele originally advertised on
MTV for a new lead singer for
the Beat. When that didn't pan out,
Cox and
Steele hooked up with the unique vocalist
Roland Gift and the trio formed
the Fine Young Cannibals, issuing their self-titled debut album in 1985. Along the lines of early
Everything But the Girl (the two groups share a producer,
Robin Millar) with a heavier
Motown influence, the songs on
Fine Young Cannibals are uniformly strong. The singles
"Johnny Come Home" (a plea to a runaway that sounds like
the Beat's
ska stripped down to its tense and obsessive essentials) and
"Blue" (one of the more oblique and successful anti-
Margaret Thatcher tracks of its era) are terrific, but album tracks like the casually devastating
"Funny How Love Is" and the manic
"Like a Stranger" (which incongruously ends with a female chorus shrieking "You've been too long in an institution!" repeatedly while
Gift tries out his
Otis Redding impression) are even better. The album's highlight, though, is a reworking of
"Suspicious Minds" (with backing vocals by
Jimmy Somerville) that, while it doesn't replace
Elvis' version, certainly takes the song into an interesting new direction. Although often overlooked in the wake of their massively successful follow-up, The Raw and the Cooked,
Fine Young Cannibals is a powerful and satisfying debut. ~ Stewart Mason
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