‘Most of it was the conga preset on Prince’s drum machine’: how Fine Young Cannibals made She Drives Me Crazy
‘Prince’s Purple Rain guitar was in the corner of the studio and his lava lamps were everywhere.You couldn’t help but be inspired’I was in a band in Hull called Akrylykz.When the Beat came to play at the Welly club we gave them a demo tape.Then they invited us to tour with them.Later, after they split up, Andy Cox and David Steele were looking for a singer for a new band and they remembered me.
Fine Young Cannibals felt right straight away.After The Tube filmed us doing Johnny Come Home, we just took off.Then somebody must have noticed me on telly because suddenly I was getting film offers, and I appeared in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Scandal.But in my heart I didn’t really want to pursue acting.It felt like being a session musician – you do your bit, then you’re not really involved.
So after the band did the soundtrack for the film Tin Men, we regrouped to do a second album.All sorts of names were mentioned as producers including, I think, Phil Collins.Instead, we ended up doing The Raw and the Cooked in a way people say you should never do an album: in lots of different studios with different producers.We did She Drives Me Crazy with David Z in Prince’s studio in Paisley Park, at which point we changed the title from She’s My Baby.I’d never sung falsetto before, but we were labelmates with Jimmy Somerville so he might have been an influence on the way I sing it.
The way I elongate some of the words – “I can’t help mysel-el-elf” and so on – isn’t proper language but rules are there to be broken.She Drives Me Crazy went Top 5 in the UK and was the first of our two US No 1s, but it was bittersweet for me.When it was a hit I was reading Money by Martin Amis and my girlfriend chucked me, just like in the book.On the other hand, we’d always talked about wanting to make music that people would listen to many years later – which is exactly what happened.We were playing about in the studio when we came up with what became the riff and beat to She Drives Me Crazy, although it was rockier at that point.
None of us really liked it and it went into the box of unfinished songs,Good Thing was set to be our “big single” but then London Records wanted us to work with other producers on other tracks,We told them we wouldn’t work with anyone else unless it was Prince,They said “We can’t get Prince!” but did suggest his engineer, David Z, and said we could do it in Prince’s studio, Paisley Park,When we sent David some songs including the beginnings of She Drives Me Crazy, he went: “This is the song! Come over.
”David let us use Prince’s room and all his equipment,The Purple Rain guitar was in the corner, his lava lamps were everywhere and the mixing desk had been used by Sly and the Family Stone,You can’t help but feel inspired in that situation, so we tried things such as putting the keyboards through Prince’s wah-wah pedals,Andy played the riff on Prince’s Rickenbacker guitar,David tells a very complicated story of how he got the snare sound by gating it and all sorts, but most of it was just the conga preset on Prince’s drum machine.
When Roland came over later from London to do the vocals he didn’t have enough words.I thought of asking Prince to write some for us but that would have turned it into a Prince song.Instead, She Drives Me Crazy was in a notebook I had of song titles.Roland and I finished the lyrics like William Burroughs cut-ups – pillaging a line from another song of ours and such.Roland laid down the falsetto and a normal vocal running parallel, a trick Prince had used on If I Was Your Girlfriend.
Prince was around but we were shy and didn’t want to bug him,After She Drives Me Crazy became the first No 1 single recorded at Paisley Park he played it in some of his post-gig jams and we were supposed to meet him properly,We never did, but sometimes it’s good to keep some mystery,Fine Young Cannibals’ career-spanning hits, rarities and remixes collection FYC40 is released on 5 December,Roland Gift’s single Everybody Knows It’s Christmas is out now
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John Tymukas obituary
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ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules
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Ben Stokes hits back at England ‘has-beens’ over criticism of Ashes preparations
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