Remember Fine Young Cannibals? Here’s why we haven’t heard from them in 25+ years

Among music’s great mysteries are what happened to Fine Young Cannibals, and whatever happened to those three guys?

We’re getting some answers now, as the group’s self-titled debut album turns 40, leading to the Dec. 5 release of a new compilation, “FYC40,” whose various configurations include remixes, videos and concert material in addition to the chart-topping hits “She Drives Me Crazy” and “Good Things.”

FYC — formed by Andy Cox and David Steele of the (English) Beat and vocalist Roland Gift, then playing saxophone with the ska group Akrylykz — was on top of the world in 1998 thanks to those songs and its double-platinum sophomore album “The Raw & the Cooked.” The group won a pair of Brit Awards and was nominated for three Grammys and did big business on the road. And then nothing; even the band’s break-up played out quietly.

Gift, now 64, released a mostly unnoticed solo album in 2002 and has also been acted in both film and TV. He also wrote a musical drama, “Return to Vegas,” for the BBC. More recently he’s taken part in Jools Holland’s annual “Hootenanny” show for BBC television and opened the dates for the Go-Go’s Belinda Carlisle in the Britain. He’s just released a holiday single, “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas” and is playing his own “40 Years of Songs by Fine Young Cannibals” shows, which will hit the road in earnest in the U.K. next May.

All of that brings Gift to Zoom to discuss…well, all of that, as well as what good things we can expect from him in the future…

You’ve been more active, certainly more visible, of late. What account for that?

Gift: For a long time, I wasn’t really sure; I didn’t really have a clear vision of who I was, what I wanted to do. But I do now, and I think that’s made a difference. I have had sort of epiphanous moments, but it’s really been sort of one thing after another, almost like I’ve been laying the foundation for this.

A few things just sort of fell into place, like it happened to be the 40th anniversary of FYC, and then Dua Lipa and Jennie from Blackpink did an advert for Chanel where they lip-synced to “She Drives Me Crazy.”

Then a promoter said, “We’d like to do a couple of gigs with you and see how that goes.” And then I had this Christmas song…A lot of things have kind of fallen into place, and that’s given me the jet fuel that I needed to sort of get things going.

What’s your perspective on Fine Young Cannibals all these years later?

Gift: I’ve been playing the songs on a regular basis for quite a long time, with my own songs, so they’ve never been that far away from me. It’s always on the radio as well. That was one of the things we wanted to do as a group, create songs people would be listening to 25 years later, just as we were listening to music that was created 25 years before.

We’d get together and play Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding or Sam Cooke or Aretha Franklin, or the (Rolling) Stones, those kinds of songs. We wanted to be making records that people would be playing well after they were first created. So I’m pleased that we did. But, like I say, I’ve been playing them, the radio plays them, so it’s a funny one, really. It doesn’t feel like it’s 40 years.

That’s quite a gauntlet to throw down for yourselves in terms of a creative goal. Did you — sorry — drive yourselves crazy coming up with songs that would achieve that?

Gift: I think it was tough, yeah, because we did hold ourselves to a high standard. With the first record we didn’t have anything to prove; the first one was enough of a success to be asked to do a second wone, so we were kind of under some kind of pressure to do it, and to do it well. I think it was a big relief after we did “The Raw & the Cooked;” I remember (after) the last session we did, I was just walking down Oxford Street heading towards this bar, and I could just feel the bricks being taken out, one by one, from the rucksack I’d been carrying, like, “Oh, this burden is lightened…”

Were you at all surprised by the success, and the life some of that material has had, especially “She Drives Me Crazy?”

Gift: Yeah, I am. I’m amazed. The longevity of that song…you let them go and other people decided what’s what. But, yeah, I’m amazed.

Then the album comes out and goes through the roof and that was it. What happened?

Gift: I know exactly what happened. Our record company hadn’t experienced the success they’d had with us before. Our managers hadn’t experienced that level of success before, and we hadn’t. Nobody knew how to deal with it, and the little kind of fissures that existed, like they do in any relationship…Being in group is like being married, and leaving the toothpaste top off or finding butter in the jam jar can make a couple resort to violence. (chuckles)

If we’d have had a good manager….someone who would manage personalities and egos and could keep their eye on the distant horizon because they were experienced and they weren’t over-awed themselves by the seeming success…I think it might have kept us together.

Did you even start to make a third album?

Gift: We tried to. The record company was saying, “This next one has to sell even more;” if it sold a quarter of “The Raw & the Cooked” it would have been successful. Then we decided to base ourselves in New York; we’d had great times going to New York, but it’s different being a visitor, even a working visitor, that actually living there.

And living there wasn’t conducive to creativity, really. Our English manager resigned; he found Ocean Colour Scene and thought they were going to be the next Beatles. And the American manager was more kind of rock ‘n’ roll than we were; I was eating macrobiotic food and doing Tai Chi, and he was drinking vodka and cranberry and doing crack and cocaine.

Was it an acrimonious break-up, or did it just fade away?

Gift: It faded away. I can remember it being the end; we were back in England and we’d been in the studio working on a song I’d written with a couple of guys called “It’s Only Money.” We seemed to be getting somewhere; it’d been kind of tense, but we were still trying to work together as a group.

That night I went to Soho to see a screening of Bernardo Bertolucci film called “Stealing Beauty;” he was looking for songs for his film and Björk was there…and so were David and Andy. We came out and I said, “Look, where are we? We’re all in the studio together, we seem to be getting somewhere, but we all knew we were gonna be here tonight and none of us mentioned it.”

I remember David said, “I’ve got to go. I’m getting some tiles delivered for my kitchen from Italy.” And Andy didn’t want to talk about it in the street. He went his way, I went my way and we never got together after that. I’m not blaming them; I was as guilty as they were. It was just a shameful situation.

Probably no prospects for a reunion, then?

Gift: I couldn’t see what kind of circumstances there would be that would have that occur. I talk to Andy from time to time…but on the whole, not really. We do talk when there’s, like a contract for publishing to be renegotiated, something like that. But generally, there isn’t that much to talk about.

With “FYC40” coming out, are there any songs from the catalog that you’d like to see get their “moment,” or more attention than maybe they did back in the day?

Gift: Not really, no — it almost seems like we got more than we deserved in a way. My favorite is “I’m Not the Man I Used to Be.” I was quite young when I wrote that, and it makes sense now in a way id didn’t so much when it was written. It was a bit precocious, really. But I can sing it with a different kind of authority now than I could then.

There were pretty high expectations for the “Roland Gift” album back in 2002. What happened there?

Gift: It was strange. We were doing a European promotion tour with just me and a guitar player, and we did something in Berlin. It was really cool, very vibey, and people were kind of excited.

Before we got to the next town there was a European sales meeting (of the record label) and they decided they weren’t gonna be promoting the solo record. It was really kind of funny to see the sort of change while we were in Germany, and how people kind of walked off the job as it were. But at the same time I didn’t have the thing that I’ve got now, which was the vision for it.

The songs, I think, are good and some of them I still play live, but it didn’t have that thing that you need behind it that makes the difference between a record and a record that somebody wants to buy.

What else is coming up in addition to the shows in May?

Gift: I did “Return to Vegas,” which started out as a film, and I’ve got this other thing for the radio called “A Punk’s Progress” that’s about when me and a couple of mats followed the Clash around England, and then I got a job working as a roadie with them for a while.

I’ve commissioned somebody to adapt it as a graphic novel, and that’s going well. That also has the potential to be quite a good little movie. And with these I have a home for new songs I write. If I do a record on its own it’s just, like Roland from the 80s doing a record, whereas if it’s with a film, one will help the other.

It’s the proverbial double-edged sword of what a successful past means to the present.

Gift: You can’t rely on the past. If you’re a new artist it’s different; there’s some kind of excitement, you’re like the new thing. But I’m not new. So I can’t rely on the FYC legacy. And I don’t want to play just the old stuff and live off that…It doesn’t feel creative. I like the challenge. I will throw the gauntlet down because I want to grow, I suppose. I don’t want it to feel like a job.