One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.
When Fine Young Cannibals covered “Suspicious Minds” in 1985, they covered more than just a song made famous by Elvis Presley in 1969. They covered a song that was iconic of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in his post-“’68 Comeback Special” pomp at the globally televised “Aloha from Hawaii” show in 1973. Sweaty, lavishly sideburned, and spangled in white American-eagle jumpsuit. Colorful lei around neck. Huge band behind him. Thirty-piece orchestra. Choir. Enraptured fans. Frenetic dancing during the extended drum fills. And acrobatic shapes that came with the immortal line: “I hope this suit don’t tear up, baby.”
Brave, then, for Fine Young Cannibals to even attempt such a song, and hugely unlikely that they should proceed to have an international smash hit with it in early 1986. They were, lest we forget, a decidedly unstarlike three-piece from Birmingham, UK, two of whom had only recently emerged from the ashes of punk-influenced, inner-city ska band The (English) Beat. They’d further stripped the song of the flamboyance, grandeur, and melodrama we’d come to associate with it, and pretty much de-Elvised it, making sure it fit, instead, with the gritty, socially conscious, and virulently anti-Margaret Thatcher vibe of their debut album.
FYC also made the song sound fresh, more urgent, and more relevant to a new—largely unemployed—generation, gaining for themselves an immortal signature tune in the process, one which would more than hold its own against “She Drives Me Crazy,” “Good Thing,” and anything off their all-conquering second album, The Raw and the Cooked. They’d clearly given the world… One Great Cover.
How, though, did the flagrantly non-jumpsuit-wearing band pull off such a stunt?
Bassist David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox were principally answerable. They were the two former members of the multiracial Beat who were attuned to the practice of brilliantly reinventing iconic tracks by musical legends, with their politics of unity—at a time of heightened racial tension in British inner cities—tied firmly to the mast. As contemporaries of UK ska acts The Specials, The Selecter, and Madness, they’d helped remodel Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown” in 1979, in such a way as to storm the UK Top Ten singles chart and make total sense to rudies, rastas, skinheads, punks, mods, new romantics, and rockers alike (no mean feat). They’d also helped turn Andy Williams’ (Pomus/Shuman-penned) “I Can’t Get Used to Losing You” into a Jamaican-flavored UK Top 5 single in 1983. That was either end of releasing self-written protest song “Stand Down Margaret,” against Thatcher’s leadership of the right-wing UK Conservative government and, therefore, the “free market” economic policies of deindustrialization and plant closures that were sending inner cities into a spiral of decline. “I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow,” went the lyrics. “Our lives seem petty in your cold, gray hands.”
Steele and Cox had form, then, in interweaving progressive covers with anti-Thatcher originals by the time they came to forge an alliance with soulful and charismatic lead singer Roland Gift, as the presage to signing to London Records as Fine Young Cannibals in early 1985. That proved useful when they needed to follow through on the huge UK chart success of their Steele/Gift-penned debut single “Johnny Come Home” in summer ’85, a magnificently skittish and poignant song that owed a debt to both ska and ’60s soul in its depiction of a young man facing up to the hopelessness of having to leave his family and desolated hometown in search of work: “Everything’s closed / Can’t find a room / Money’s all blown / Nowhere to sleep.” They were tasked, indeed, with following up a track that captured the mood of Thatcher’s Britain now that unemployment had topped 3 million and Tory Minister Norman Tebbit, as Employment Secretary, had ostensibly dispensed the reviled advice to jobless young people to “get on their bike.”
It was after FYC’s subsequent failure to find that follow-up hit in “Blue,” with similarly gloomy “Government has done me wrong” / “My hometown is falling down” message, that they released “Suspicious Minds” in January ’86. The band made their intention clear at the outset of the song, by way of an uptempo rhythm on cymbal, and a clean, pacey, no-messing guitar arpeggio. This was to be no tribute to the “definitive” Elvis #1 epic of 1969 that was defined as much by its immense Chips Moman soul arrangement—direct from the American Sound Studio in Memphis—as it was the King’s passionate vocal. Nor was it to honor the stately, big-ballad Mark James original of 1968. Nor, indeed, the weepy Waylon Jennings/Jessi Colter country duet of 1976, steel guitars, angelic backing singers, and all. No, this was to be a crisper, janglier, and far more understated beast, with the trio’s by-now familiar brand of discontent at its heart.
The track fulfilled its promise. Cox drove it along with his intricate, twangy, busker-defying riff, and Gift most certainly made his presence known with his unique vocal style. The singer was a soul man, for sure, and the comparisons to Otis Redding were somewhat justified. But nobody did that quivery thing quite like him, and so that powerful yet vulnerable thing, which made him perfect in the role of the song’s troubled narrator who frets endlessly about the deep level of mistrust in his relationship with his lover. Against incoming strings and doleful trumpets, he became the embodiment of dismay and desperation, while seeming to remain, in fact, the frustrated soul of “Johnny Come Home” and “Blue,” singing of suspicion in the same heartfelt way he sang of crushed opportunities and disenfranchisement in the Thatcher-created ghost towns of the UK. “We’re caught in a trap.” “We can’t build our dreams.” “Why can’t you see what you’re doin’ to me?”
Then there were the falsetto backing vocals of Scottish singer Jimmy Somerville, which considerably upped the intensity of the FYC cover. Somerville had sung the seminal 1984 Bronski Beat single “Smalltown Boy,” seemingly about a young gay man forced to leave his hometown at a point when the Thatcher regime had begun poisoning the country with its discriminatory policies against the LGBTI community in its promotion of “family values” (all of which would culminate in the infamous Section 28 of 1988). His was a voice, therefore, that rebuked Margaret’s Conservative government as FYC had done on “Johnny,” a voice that now meshed with Gift’s on “Suspicious Minds,” with characteristic “done me wrong” vigor and passion.
With Somerville’s help, then, FYC brought what had been a pivotal Elvis number back to the upper reaches of the pop charts in a way that had contemporary bite and relevance—an achievement the Pet Shop Boys must surely have taken note of when they came to consider a cover of “Always on My Mind,” a song co-written, incidentally, by Mark James. The band’s success was such that Gift continued to sing the track, as a solo performer, into the new millenium—and continues to do so today. Currently playing live shows to celebrate “40 years of FYC” (who, erm, split in 1992), he comments: “We always used to say we wanted people to be playing our records 25 years after they were released, the way we listened to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye – it looks like we did that, and much more.”
Bring it on, then! “Johnny Come Home.” “Good Thing.” “She Drives Me Crazy.” “I’m Not The Man I Used To Be.” “Suspicious Minds.”
Another great one is the version Dwight Yoakam used to close his shows with (at least in the 90’s). He’d open with Little Sister and close with Suspicious Minds.