Today’s Song of the Day is the Fine Young Cannibals’ Good Thing. From their 1988 album The Raw and The Cooked, Good Thing has a retro Northern Soul sound and reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts. In addition to the contributions of the band – Roland Gift’s falsetto lead, Andrew Cox’s thin guitar, and David Steele’s bass – it also features the piano playing of Jools Holland of Squeeze and great Motownesq backing vocals. The album itself is a masterpiece, also featuring another number one hit – She Drives Me Crazy – and a killer remake of the Buzzcock’s Ever Fall In Love, among others. The band, and Good Thing, were featured in Barry Levinson’s 1987 movie Tin Men, with the Fine Young Cannibals playing the song as a nightclub band in 1963 Baltimore. The band itself rose out of the ashes of the Beat (the English Beat for those in the US), where Cox and Steele served as the rhythm section that drove it’s sound. Alas, the Fine Young Cannibals did not stay around long, and never released a proper follow-up to their 1988 smash album.
