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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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052989
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05298900.062
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1990-09-22
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MUSIC, Page 87Gift Wrapped for a RuckusHe sings! He acts! He won't eat cod!By Jay Cocks
There is a gentleman with a gun in the street, and he has come
to call. He won't bother with the bell, though. He'll announce
himself by shooting the front door full of holes. The guy with the
gat is Roland Gift, lead singer of a nifty rock band called the
Fine Young Cannibals, and movie star aborning. In that scene from
Scandal, a just opened cinema chronicle of Britain's Profumo-Keeler
scandal of the early '60s, Gift is doing onscreen the same sort of
number he's been running on the music scene: making a little room
for himself and raising a major ruckus.
Gift has made his biggest noise on the record charts with the
Cannibals. Their latest album, The Raw & the Cooked, has sold 3
million copies worldwide since January. The first single, She
Drives Me Crazy, hit No. 1 on the U.S. charts, and a second, Good
Thing, is just breaking. The band also features a couple of
dexterous guitarists, Andy Cox and David Steele, formerly of the
English Beat. But it's Gift everyone is noticing at the moment.
He's got a supple way with a tune, and a promising presence
onscreen.
That's treacherous turf, rocking and acting. From Elvis to
Sting, one medium seems to undercut the other. But if they can be
reconciled, then Roland Gift has the cool to bring it off. One
wants to retain a little mystery as a performer and steer clear of
typecasting, especially along color lines. In fact, his father was
black and his mother white, but further details of the family
history are dear. The middle child in a family of five, Gift, 28,
grew up in Hull, a small port city in the industrial north. "My
father died when I was very young," he says. "My mother's a dealer.
Not crack. She deals in clothes, jewelry and other secondhand
stuff."
Gift would prefer to talk about something else. Swimming, say.
Or fencing, a sport he's just taken up. But questions of a personal
nature are skirted, skimmed, finally finessed. He'd sooner study
the lunch menu. "Do you eat cod?" he asks, looking up from the
day's offerings. "Well, I don't. I eat haddock instead. Cod is full
of worms. I once worked as a fish gutter, and I was supposed to
pick the worms out. That was my job. But since you had to fill a
certain quota of boxes in order to get paid, you often didn't
bother to get all the worms out."
However he feels around cod, Gift has a smooth, soulful way
around a tune. His voice sounded a little uncertain on a remake of
Elvis' Suspicious Minds, from the first Cannibals album, Fine Young
Cannibals, released in 1985. The sensual assurance Gift acquired
on The Raw & the Cooked may come from some special attention he has
been lavishing on his vocal cords. "I do go to see someone now and
again for guidance about my voice," he reports. "But it's for moral
guidance, because I think there's more to singing than just songs."
A Cannibals tune like I'm Not Satisfied has an elegant, low-down
savor that has little to do with moral authority, however. It works
so nicely, as the album co-producer David Z. explains, "because it
bridges the gap between pop and alternative music." It also hits
home because of Gift's vocals.
He can aim high when he sings and still hit below the belt.
His secret is simple, elemental. Even laid-back, he sounds sexy,
an inborn talent that was nurtured by some early vocational
training. "You're talking to someone who used to be a male
stripper," he says. "It was all show business, and it's probably
helped with my presentation." Just so no one gets too comfy with
what to expect of Gift, he has signed up to do a production of
Romeo and Juliet later this year in the north of England, and is
reading the script for a part in a Sylvester Stallone movie. "I've
been asked," Gift reports, "to play one of his muscles." He smiles.
Sure, he'll give it a go. And maybe be good at it too. There may
be a sufficiency of talent, but there is certainly no time to talk.
-- Naushad S. Mehta/New York and Nancy Seufert/London