Roland Gift Steps Into Christmas
The Fine Young Cannibal celebrates the holiday season with festive new single
In the United Kingdom, it’s a longstanding tradition to have a friendly but intense competition to see which holiday single will reach the top of the music charts in the week leading up to Christmas, with campaigns waged between old favorites and brand new songs.
This year, there’s a new contender: “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas” by Roland Gift, the soulful English singer who first rose to fame in the 1980s as the frontman of Fine Young Cannibals.
During a recent video call from his North London home, Gift smiles as he notes that his song might win this year. “We are in the running now: The bookkeepers have got us on their books,” he says. “I think the last time I saw, it was 66 to 1, so if you put a bet on, you might make some money!”
Although “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas” was just released (it came out in the U.S. on Dec. 5), Gift actually wrote the song years ago, and has been performing it whenever he has done a show around Christmastime.
That single isn’t Gift’s only big news: this year also happens to be the 40th anniversary of the year that Fine Young Cannibals released their self-titled debut album. Although the band split up for good in the early 1990s, he and his former bandmates are still on good terms, and they’re marking this milestone by releasing an extensive retrospective, FYC40 (which also was released on Dec. 5, via London Records).
Of course, FYC40 contains all of the band’s hit singles, such as “She Drives Me Crazy,” “Good Thing,” “Johnny Come Home” and “Don’t Look Back.” It also includes numerous remixes and rarities, and compiles many of the B-sides from their previous singles.
“I was more concerned with what didn’t go on,” Gift says of the retrospective’s track listing. “I didn’t want anything to go on that didn’t seem representative, or was just a crap idea, and that’s why it never got on [an album] in the first place.”
While he’s clearly proud of the work he did with Fine Young Cannibals, Gift also admits that he’s a bit leery of dwelling on it. “I’m pleased that people like the [older] songs and people are still interested in them,” he says, but adds that “I don’t want to be just living off the past.”
Gift’s remarkable vocals are undoubtedly a big reason why Fine Young Cannibals found such success, and remain so beloved four decades later — but he is quick to give credit to his favorite singer, Otis Redding, for inspiring him in the first place.
“I remember my sister bursting out into tears once, way back in 1967; I was staying with her and her husband in a cottage in Wales where they used to live,” Gift says. “I was very young at the time, I was probably about six [years old], and I was upset because she was crying. She said, ‘Otis Redding has died.’
“Seeing that happen with my sister, and then hearing his music being played a lot at that time, might have affected me and made me open to Otis Redding and his music, and the effect that it could have on somebody, to move them emotionally.”
As he entered his teenage years, he studied Redding’s songs carefully, collecting his albums and singing along to them.
Other influences also made an impact at this time. “I used to be in a drama group when I was young,” he says. “We used to devise plays through improvisation. Sometimes a local person might have written a play that we would do. But we also did this thing that was kind of like a 1930s sort of cabaret dance thing, and in that, I did sing a couple of songs. That was where I first really sang onstage.”
Even then, Gift had the kind of self-confidence that would later help him flourish as a frontman. “Somebody said to me, ‘You should take singing lessons.’ And I suppose I could have taken it as like, ‘Oh, you’re so awful – you ought to take singing lessons.’ But I took it as encouragement,” he says.
By the mid-1970s, though, he had moved on to punk rock, and began joining groups. His band Akrylykz had moderate success, and ended up opening for another band, The Beat. When those groups disbanded, two former members of The Beat — guitarist Andrew Cox and bassist David Steele — approached Gift about forming a new band together, and Fine Young Cannibals were born.
In a way, Cox and Steele brought Gift full circle when they asked to work with him. “They said that they were looking for a young Otis Redding,” Gift says, though he notes that he wasn’t made aware of this at the time. They all also shared a love for reggae. These elements, along with the punk rock history they all had, resulted in a highly distinctive sound that was at once sophisticated and edgy.
It was immediately clear that they had something special when, during the first couple of times they met up, they wrote the songs “Funny How Love Is” and “Move to Work,” both of which ended up on their 1985 self-titled debut album, which turned 40 on Dec. 9.
“One of the things that we did state, almost like a mission statement, [was] that we wanted to make a record that people would be listening to 25 years later,” Gift says. “We wanted to make something good that wasn’t just trendy. We wanted to do something that was going to last. So that intention, with some luck, is what is the result of that.”
Although the band earned major success across Europe, North America, and Australia, they called it quits after releasing one more studio album, 1989’s The Raw & the Cooked, and a few more singles through the early 1990s.
Since then, Gift has stayed prolific: Besides launching a solo career (he released a self-titled album in 2002, and has continued to perform throughout the years), he also has found significant success as an actor and a writer for the theater, cinema and radio. He is planning to turn Return to Vegas, a 2020 musical drama he wrote and starred in for BBC Radio, into a film.
Next year, Gift plans to do a series of concerts across the U.K. throughout May. He’s cautious when asked if there will also be any North American shows, though.
“Possibly…I’ll see how things go,” he says, then stresses he’s not avoiding making that cross-Atlantic trip, but rather feels the need to finish other projects first. “I just want to make sure that I get these things out that have been in my heart and in my notebooks. I would hate it if they just remained something that I talked about and didn’t make happen. I’d feel very ashamed of myself.”
It seems evident that by any reasonable standard, Gift has already accomplished more than most artists, but as he looks back on everything he’s done so far, he is modest.
“In some ways, I don’t feel like I’ve had a career — I feel like I’ve done a few things, but I don’t really feel like I’ve had a career,” he says. “And I feel like I’ve got a bit more to do!”
VIDEO: Roland Gift “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas”
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