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?
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