In its earliest stage, Roland Gift’s Christmas song wasn’t about tubular bells, caroling choirs, or anything jolly. It was a more tragic narrative on how pursuing a career in pop music can be lethal. “It used to be called ‘Pop Suicide,’” reveals Gift of his new holiday single, “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas,” a track that had a few iterations since he first started writing it more than 20 years ago.
“It was a completely different subject,” adds the former Fine Young Cannibals frontman. “It was about the casualties of pop, and how companies take the young and eat them.”
Co-written with longtime collaborator Ben Barson (Tina Turner, Kate Bush), brother of Madness’s Mike Barson, and featuring cover art by British artist Harry Pye, “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas” was originally released on the 2005 Christmas compilation Dear Santa: Holiday Music Collection, Vol. 1 as a slower and soulful track. The newer version picks up the tempo and lifts the message of unity during the holiday season, a happier endng that surprised Gift.
“When I write other stories or scripts, they actually tend to have a happy ending, and that surprises me, because it’s not that I’m cynical, but I’m looking for what’s really being said rather than what somebody says they’re saying,” Gift shares.
“I’m interested in the subtext,” he adds. “I’m interested in what’s really going on in the world, rather than what we’re told is going on. If you look at the subject matter of the songs I’ve written, it’s quite sad. It’s about unrequited love or something going wrong, but the act of singing them is uplifting.”
Along with the revived Christmas song is a commemoration of Gift’s former band Fine Young Cannibals on he new compilation, FYC40, a collection pulled from the band’s brief, yet chart-heavy catalog. Though FYC were short-lived during the ’80s, releasing only two albums, an eponymous debut in 1984 and The Raw & the Cooked in 1989, the trio—Gift, bassist Andy Cox, and guitarist David Steele—left behind a string of hits with their earlier “Johnny Come Home,” chart-topping “Good Thing,” and Grammy-winning “She Drives Me Crazy.”
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The compilation also includes the band’s 1986 cover of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” and the Buzzcocks’ punk classic “Ever Fallen in Love,” the latter featured on the soundtrack to the 1986 film Something Wild, starring Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels. Expanded formats also feature remixes of FYC songs by De La Soul’s Prince Paul, Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B, Roger Sanchez, and more, along with BBC performances and the band’s Live At The Paramount concert from 1989.
During Fine Young Cannibal’s peak, Gift also started exploring acting, something he’s continued in television and film, making his debut in the 1987 movie Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Other projects included a recurring role on Highlander: The Series, another as a musician alongside Helen Mirren in Painted Lady in 1997, and more through an appearance on the British comedy Meet the Richardsons in 2021.
Gift also wrote and starred in two BBC Radio 4 dramas: Return to Vegas, about a former pop star getting out of prison, feaaturing more songs co-written with Barson, and The Punk’s Progress, a more personal account centered around his real-life jaunt with friends during the late 1970s, following the Clash on tour.
The Punk’s Progress follows a then 17-year-old Gift, who bused from is hometown of Hull, England with friends in June of 1978 to see the Clash play Queens Hall in Leeds. There, they also see the earliesr iteration of the Specials, then called Coventry Automatics, and later connect with their heroes after Gift saves the Clash’s Joe Strummer’s pants from falling apart. During the band’s set, when Strummer’s pants started tearing, he asks if anyone has a safety pin. Gift comes to his rescue, pulling a blue-capped nappy one off his leather jacket.
“With punk I found a family, a lifestyle, creativity, a way to be,” Gift previously said about the story, which is being adapted into a graphic novel with a graphic artist from Hull. “I might not have appreciated it consciously, but when Joe Strummer took my pin, he gave me fraternity.”
After the show, Gift and his friends followed the band around on a road trip of mishaps.“We saw them in Leeds, and then decided to see them in Sheffield and then Leicester, and then we got into a car crash, and we had to find our own ways home,” recalls Gift. “By the end of that, I did come down to London around the Music Machine where they were playing, and I did get a job as a roadie with them.”
The graphic novel will be illustrated by an artist Gift found in Hull. “I just came across this guy who lives in Hull where I used to live, and he had done some illustrations for a local history thing,” says Gift. And it was just one of those things that sort of fell into place. He recently moved back to Hull, so I sent him the script and he did a few frames, and it was what I had imagined.”
During Gift’s brief stint with the Clash—even appearing as their roadie in the 1980 film Rude Boy—Gift also played saxophone for the Hull ska band Akrylykz before connecting with bassist Andy Cox and guitarist David Steele, who were in the Beat (The English Beat), and forming Fine Young Cannibals in 1984.
Reflecting on the 40 years since FYC hit the scene during the mid-‘80s, Gift cites a song he wrote, “Say It Ain’t So,” which he later recorded as a solo artist, and how his songwriting developed in the band.
“I wrote that while the Cannibals were still together, because the way we tended to work was I would do the melodies and the words, and David [Steele] and others would do the chords, the bass, and the beats,” recalls Gift. “It was kind of unusual, and I accepted the way things were, but I think it changed the dynamic of the group a bit, and it wasn’t long after that we stopped functioning as a group.”
Before FYC disbanded in 1992, Gift was also working with other writers, as were Steele and Cox, who collaborated with legendary songwriter Lamont Dozier. “In a sense, for both Dave and Andy and myself, working with other people was a bit like an infidelity,” says Gift. “I didn’t say that then. It’s only now I’m saying it, because groups are like marriages, and three people can be a powerful number. And it can be a strange number, because somebody is going to feel left out at some point.”
Years after Fine Young Cannibals split—and following a brief reunion to record “Flame” for the compilation The Finest—“Say It Ain’t So” was used in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 coming-of-age drama Stealing Beauty and was later released on Gift’s only solo release, a self-titled album, in 2002.
After releasing the album, Gift says he went into the “doldrums” for some time. He also took a hiatus from music to raise his two sons before reemerging and playing live again in 2012, and has continued playing and writing since.
“I surprise myself with what comes out,” he says, “but that’s what I like about writing, not knowing what’s going to happen.”
Though Gift, who continues to play with his band the Blacks, hasn’t released another album in more than 20 years, he’s continued keeping his music and FYC live, most recently touring with Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra from 2021 through 2022 and wrapping up a string of dates with Belinda Carlisle in 2025, along with a sold-out show, 40 Years of Songs by Fine Young Cannibals, at the London Palladium, another at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, and an additional six dates in the UK through May 2026.
Returning to Fine Young Cannibal’s songs live is something that still resonates with Gift. “Those songs have never really been that far away from me,” Gift says. “It doesn’t really feel like 40 years. We can talk about stuff that we did when we were 17 or younger, and it doesn’t feel that far away. I don’t feel that different, so I suppose it’s what they say: ‘It’s just a number.’”
Photo: Roland Gift by Linda Nylind
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