Charismatic Cannibal Takes His Time : British band’s fast-rising new album ends 3-year layoff, breakup rumors

Momentum can be crucial in pop music, where out of sight has often proved to be out of mind. So industry observers saw danger signals all around when the Fine Young Cannibals didn’t follow their highly regarded 1985 debut album with a new collection in 1986 . . . or 1987 . . . or 1988.

The first suspicion: Roland Gift, the English rock trio’s charismatic lead singer, was going solo.

On the first Cannibals LP, Gift demonstrated the talent as a singer and lyricist to make the prospect reasonable. Not only did he turn in an exquisite vocal on a remake of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” but he also won praise for his affecting tales of troubled social conditions. The headline in more than one British pop weekly: “God’s Gift to Rock.”

Second line of speculation: The other Cannibals--guitarist Andy Cox and bassist David Steele--were breaking away themselves, miffed by Gift’s spending two months making his acting debut in director Stephen Frears’ film “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.”

While Gift was off making the film, Steele and Cox indeed recorded a single under the pseudonym Two Men, a Drum Machine & a Trumpet. The record, “Tired of Getting Pushed Around,” became an international dance-club hit, and some observers saw the song’s title as a not-so-subtle message to Gift. The pair also produced the debut album by the British group Wee Papa Girl Rappers.

But there was no split.

Whatever tensions may have existed privately, the Cannibals are back with a new album, “The Raw & the Cooked.” It’s a sensational blend of rock and soul elements: a dance-floor treat that doesn’t sacrifice vocal and lyric sensitivity. (See Review on Page 84).

“She Drives Me Crazy,” a single from the LP, is already in the national Top 40, and I.R.S. Records is optimistic that the album will be one of the year’s biggest hits. “Our initial sales projection was 2 million units for the album,” said Jay Boberg, president of I.R.S. “But the album is moving so well that we’re already looking beyond that.”

Al Teller, president of MCA Records, which distributes I.R.S., also predicted “The Raw & the Cooked” would go multi-platinum.

Though the former president of CBS Records took over at MCA only in September, Teller was familiar with the Cannibals’ 1985 collection. “In fact,” he said. “Among the questions I had for MCA was, ‘Whatever happened to the Fine Young Cannibals?’

“What makes the album so gratifying is that it represents a major breakthrough in terms of further crumbling the artificial boundaries in radio--the boundaries between what is rock, dance, urban, pop. . . . You go from cut to cut on the album and you’ll find strains of everything . . . .”

So why the three years-plus wait between albums?

Roland Gift, 27, rolls his eyes and smiles when he hears the question.

“Everyone kept talking about how we had split up,” he said. “It was the only reasoning they could come up with to explain why we wouldn’t rush back into the studio and put out another album. But the thing is, if you haven’t got the songs, you can’t make a good album and we knew we didn’t have the songs.

“The danger is letting acclaim or popularity lull you into thinking you can do anything, that you are supermen, that the record will somehow be good even without great songs. But we never fell into that. We had enough sense to take our time.”

The Cannibals may not have released an album since 1985, but the group hasn’t been totally silent the last three years. They toured the U.S. in late 1986, and several songs from the first album--notably “Suspicious Minds” and “Blue”--were widely played on college and alternative rock radio stations well into 1987.

Among those impressed: film director Barry Levinson, who asked the band to write some songs for his film “Tin Men.” The result was four Cannibals songs and a cameo appearance by the band in the film.

I.R.S.’s Boberg said the film helped keep the Cannibals’ presence alive in the pop world.

“When the movie came out, we got hundreds of inquiries from fans and retailers, asking when the sound-track album was going to come out. The same thing happened when the film went on cable. But there wasn’t enough music for an album, so people had to either buy the first album or wait for the new one.”

Boberg said more interest in the Cannibals was built when the trio’s version of an old Buzzcocks song, “Ever Fallen in Love,” was included in the score to Jonathan Demme’s film “Something Wild,” starring Melanie Griffith. The film exposure helped push sales of the debut album--which had stopped at around 200,000 after the initial air play and tour--past the 350,000 mark.

Gift was soft-spoken but self-assured as he sat in a Hollywood hotel recently and talked about the Cannibals. One of five children, he was raised by his mother, a shopkeeper in Hull, a once-thriving fishing port in northeast England.

Apparently disinterested in school, he found comfort in the punk movement of the late ‘70s--reportedly dying his hair red, gold and green (the colors of the Ethiopian flag), wearing bondage trousers, and attaching the severed arm of a doll to a jacket sleeve.

Caught up in the anybody-can-start-a-band spirit of the punk era, Gift joined a group that got its name from the room where it practiced: Blue Kitchen. “We didn’t have a lot of equipment so we used pots and pans as drums when we practiced, then sort of borrowed people’s drums when we did a gig,” he recalled.

Gift was a saxophonist in the band because singers in the early days of punk just shouted, and that didn’t interest him.

“The funny thing is that singing was what made me first want to be in music,” he said. “I remember listening to an Otis Redding album . . . ‘Otis Blue’ . . . when I was around 10. It was mainly the singing, not so much the songs. . . . The voice just seemed like such magic.

“But the punk thing wasn’t really into singing . . . at least not the way I thought of it. That’s why I picked up on the saxophone. It wasn’t until bands like the Clash started opening people up to other styles of music . . . reggae and black music . . . that having a good voice came back in style.”

Gift was still primarily a saxophonist when he met Steele and Cox, who were still in the English Beat, one of the most prominent ska-related rock bands to surface in England in the late ‘70s. Though Gift only did about three vocals when his band, the Akrylyx, opened for the Beat in the early ‘80s in Hull, Cox and Steele remembered him in 1984 when they were putting together a new band.

“It’s not like they couldn’t get me out of their mind or anything,” Gift said good-naturedly. “They simply couldn’t find anyone else. They had done this ad on MTV saying they were looking for a singer and they got 400 tapes, but they didn’t like any of them. That’s when they decided to take a chance on me.”

The Fine Young Cannibals’ first album was one of the most striking debuts of the ‘80s. The most immediately appealing ele-ment was the singing. Besides the smokey richness of Gift’s voice, there was a tension in his phrasing as he teasingly held certain words and chopped off others, making every syllable seem a new adventure.

The socially-conscious themes stamped the Cannibals as a political band, but Gift said that slant was never a conscious part of his game plan. In the new album, he writes about the ups and downs of romance, but also about life in a dead-end town and the loss of innocence. Whatever the setbacks his characters encounter, there is always a sense of resilience.

“Fighting back is something I believe in,” Gift said. “That’s why I think of our songs as modern-day blues. It helps to sing about things that trouble you. It’s also a sign of getting older. You learn to deal with life better. When you are 15 or 16, everything is so life and death. If somebody stops going out with you, you almost feel like slitting your wrists. Everything is today because you think you are going to die by 30 anyway.”

Given the Cannibals’ determination to wait until they had enough strong songs for the album, it’s not surprising that the group is also taking its time about making tour plans. They want to see how the album does before deciding what size halls to play.

Gift, meanwhile, has completed work on a second film, “Scandal.” Just released in England, it is the story of the Christine Keeler/John Profumo government sex scandal in England in the early ‘60s. Gift plays one of Keeler’s boyfriends.

About his and the band’s good fortunes, the singer-actor said, “We’ve all seen so many bands come and go--virtually explode before your eyes. We never wanted to get into that race. We had confidence in our abilities. The record company was very understanding.

“They could have held back some of our money in hopes of getting us back into the studio faster, but I think they see longevity in us as well. They had enough faith to say, ‘Let us know when you are ready.’ And one day we called and said, ‘OK, it’s time.’ ”