Fine Young Cannibals – Ever Fallen In Love
The true, dreadful nature of music in the 1980s is slowly being eroded from our memories. Some do-gooders are trying to accentuate the positive and claim that the decade which spawned hip-hop, the Smiths, Pixies et al was a rip-roaring success. Today, Bad Cover Versions presents the case for the opposition.
Greed, as we are now reminded at every tedious opportunity, was Good in the 80s. This greed extended its slithery green tentacles into the sights of Jazz-Funk catastrophes Fine Young Cannibals when they decided to comprehensibly offend the world with their cover of the classic Ever Fallen In Love by the Buzzcocks.
In the song’s vapid execution, the characteristically ravenous consumption of Greed is laid bare. Fine Young Cannibals chose not to celebrate the song, but to gleefully and daintily jack-hammer the song to smithereens with a fetid fusillade of hideously twangy bass, drumbeats wetter than a dying dog’s farts, and ludicrous tight-throat yodelling vocals.
Throughout the video, aptly-surnamed singer Roland Gift provides just that in the form of an unintentionally hilarious performance art piece entitled Strange Little Yelping Singer Mime-Fences With Invisible Man Whilst Balancing Hair-Coloured Brillo Pad On Head.
Gift embraces a unique style of singing that sounds as if he had learnt to speak English whilst trapped in a perpetually vibrating box with only a tape of Rick James B-sides for company.
In retrospect, we can blame the hapless Roland for T-Pain too: for he is a man with his own built-in Autotune, albeit one whose oscillation frequency is turned up to eleven. At times it sounds as if his whole body is jiggling at a high frequency, raising the intriguing possibility that he was operating a hydraulic drill whilst in the recording studio.
Fittingly for a decade that gave us Diet Coke, this eerily vague reworking is truly the most Lite of all the covers: Funk-Lite, Jazz-Lite, Soul-Lite, you-name-it-Lite. Fallen In Love proves for ever that cod-funk is not only the most hopeless of all the funks, but that Fine Young Cannibals have perfected the genre, and here they whip cubic tons of stale air into the song until it is as soft and appealing as a freshly deposited baby poo.
In fact, so wispy is Fallen In Love that once it has evaporated the residual feeling is one of absence. It is as if something has been forcibly removed from the listener – the aural equivalent of a bulimic’s visit to McDonald’s: all the horrible flavour, none of the fat, and a strange euphoria when it’s finally over.
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