Roland uses his gifts

Press, 26 July 1989, Page 26

Roland uses his gifts

Roland Gift, a “Hunk of the Month” candidate, is spending his time in both music and film careers. He has a central, tough guy role in “Scandal,” a movie coming soon that shows the fall of a British Government. — NEIL SPENCER meets Gift in London: —

Roland Gift is a man who attracts strong emotions. As a singer with the Fine Young Cannibals, his quavering, impassioned voice — hovering somewhere between Otis Redding and Al Jolson — is a love it/hate it kind of affair. As band front man and fledgling film star, his striking, chiselled features are as distinctive as his voice and have won him “Hunk of the Month” awards in several young women’s glossies. It’s a role the 27-year-old singer still finds bemusing. “It’s peculiar to have people say you’re handsome, because I still remember a time when I didn’t feel attracted to myself or feel comfortable with my body or looks, when I didn’t feel I had any chance at all.” Such recollections must be receding fast. Certainly for Roland, 1989 has so far been a gift of a year. He’s seen both the Cannibals single, “She Drives Me Crazy” and LP, “The Raw and the Cooked,” clamber effortlessly into

the upper reaches of the charts. He can comfortably anticipate a similar result at the cinema box office with the release of “Scandal,” the screen re-enact-ment of the 1963 Profumo affair, in which he plays one of Christine Keeler’s boyfriends. In person, Gift’s wellmodulated voice and relaxed manner are in sharp contrast to his abrasive vocals and moody stage and film persona. Last year was gruelling, he says, with the twin demands of acting and recording. “We wrote painfully slowly,” he concedes of his collaborations with bassist David Steele who, along with guitarist Andy Cox (he of the rubber legs), makes up the Cannibalistic trio. Upon its arrival in 1985,

the group had an immediate success with “Johnny Come Home,” followed quickly by “Blue” and a make-over of an old Presley warhorse, “Suspicious Minds,” the cannibals’ first Stateside hit. But the group’s subsequent career has been fitful. "If you can’t do good things it’s better to do nothing,” says Steele of its erratic profile, which has been partly enforced by Gift’s absences to film “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” and then “Scandal.” While Gift was away, Steele and Cox exercised their production skills for the Wee Papa Girl Rappers and Pop Will Eat Itself Out, among others. They had a minor hit with a disco tune issued with an artist credit of Two Men, A Drum Machine and A Trumpet. Neither the Fine Young

Cannibals’ music, with its echoes of 60s soul, or its gritty unglamorous image, conform to current fashions, and they’ve won through largely by the directness and understated craft of their writing, as well as Gift’s compelling presence. Their new LP has a crisper, more mid-Atlantic feel and bears the clear imprint of Prince’s Paisley Park Studios, where producer David Z helped over the mixing board. It seems that even Roland has trouble with his voice: "I try to play it like an instrument,” he says, “but it's a spontaneous thing. I have trouble double-tracking things — you do feel different every minute and it shows up in your voice.” The group’s origins lie in the late 19705, when Cox and Steele were teen-

age hopefuls in Birmingham’s The Beat, one of the best of the giddy punk/reggae collisions emerging from the Midlands at the time. “We were meant to be the Handsworth Sound, the sound of the inner-city struggle,” recalls Steele. When The Beat fragmented in 1984, Cox and Steele recruited Gift from the London reggae outfit, The Acrylics, where he was playing saxophone after moving down from Hull. They took the name from a 1960 jazz movie, “All The Fine Young Cannibals.” “I always wanted to be a singer, but in punk days there wasn’t a lot of skill to singing,” says Gift. “You didn’t have to carry a tune, it was mostly shouting. I wanted to do something skilful, and you can’t shout with a sax

Plus the sax gives you a good image. It’s a very photogenic instrument.” A charismatic TV debut on Channel Four’s “The Tube” midway through 1985 secured a hitherto elusive recording contract and the first single, “Johnny Come Home,” was in the charts in a matter of weeks. The history of pop stars transferring their ambitions to the cinema, is, to say the least, chequered, bringing resounding raspberries for Bowie, Dylan, Lydon, Jagger and Sting (among others), but the celluloid fates have always looked kindly on both Gift and.the Cannibals.

The first smile of fortune came when American director Barry Levinson picked up a cassette of the Cannibals’ first LP at a truck stop while

shooting “Tin Men” in Pittsburgh. He became so enamoured with it that he commissioned the group to write a score for the film and spliced in a lastminute cameo performance of them as a 60s bar band. Subsequently director Jonathan Demme, who had seen the group play in New York, asked them to record “Ever Fallen In Love,” the Buzzcocks’ lovelorn classic, for the soundtrack of “Something Wild,” helping precipitate what was by then their fourth hit single. Michael Caton Jones’ “Scandal” seems unlikely to blot the copybook. Starring John Hurt and Bridget Fonda, it has already become one of the icons of 89. As Johnny Edgecombe, one of the boyfriends of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, Roland gets to shoot down doors and generally trample all over any strong, silent stereotype that’s been stalking him since “Sammy and Rosie.” London Observer