Fine Young Cannibals have been discussing the making of She Drives Me Crazy, their 1988 smash hit single, revealing how they drew inspiration from recording it at Prince’s Paisley Park studio complex using the great man’s gear.
Speaking to The Guardian, lead singer Roland Gift says that, as they prepared to record what would turn out to be their second and final album, 1989’s The Raw & the Cooked, the names of all kinds of different producers were discussed, including Phil Collins. In the end, though, the band elected to make the record “in a way people say you should never do an album: in lots of different studios with different producers.”
Top of the ‘dream collaborator’ list was Prince but the band’s label, London Records, had to break it to them that he wasn’t an option. However, they did manage to secure the services of Prince associate David Z, the elder brother of Revolution drummer Bobby Z, and he got the go-ahead to let Fine Young Cannibals use not only Paisley Park, but also all of Prince's equipment.
“The Purple Rain guitar was in the corner, his lava lamps were everywhere and the mixing desk had been used by Sly and the Family Stone,” remembers the band’s bassist David Steele, who also played keyboards and programmed the drum machine.
Inspired by their situation, Steele says that they started to experiment with the toys they had to play with.
“We tried things such as putting the keyboards through Prince’s wah-wah pedals,” he remembers. “Andy [Cox, guitarist] played the riff on Prince’s Rickenbacker guitar. David tells a very complicated story of how he got the snare sound by gating it and all sorts, but most of it was just the conga preset on Prince’s drum machine.”
Speaking to Mix Online in 2001 about the collaboration - and Fine Young Cannibals’ hope that Prince might produce for them - David Z explained: “They were told that Prince doesn’t work with anybody that way, as a producer-for-hire. But they were also told there was someone who works with Prince who does. That was me, and they were willing to try it out.”
Z also told Mix that “complicated story” of how the snare drum was created, confirming that the drum machine in question was a Linn 9000 - an evolution of the Linn LM-1 (and then the LinnDrum) that Prince became a master of in the early ‘80s. It turns out that there was a lot more to the sound than that, though.
“I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a Shure 57 microphone,” he explained. “As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550] EQ around 1kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the Linn itself, which was a 12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with.”
There was more, though: Z then took this blended sound and ran it through an upside down Autatone speaker that was sitting on a snare drum, which then rattled and added more ambience. A bit of limiting and a touch of reverb and the wood-blocky ‘snare’ was complete.
Z says that he went on to hear countless approximations of his sound on other records and believes it was even sampled directly on some. And, decades later, it was still inspiring other artists - in fact, speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014, producer Jack Antonoff said that it was this very sound that sealed his creative bond with Taylor Swift.
“The moment when we shifted from friendship into working together was when we were talking about the snare drum on Fine Young Cannibals’ She Drives Me Crazy,” Antonoff confirmed. “Taylor brought it up first, and I was like, ‘Holy shit, you’re not going to believe this: I just sampled that snare in a track.’ I played her one second of it on my iPhone, and she was like, ‘Send me that track.’”
That song would end up being I Wish You Would, from Swift’s 1989 (the very year that The Raw & the Cooked was released, funnily enough), and she was quick to praise the Fine Young Canniballs hit that kickstarted it.
“I really think She Drives Me Crazy could be on the radio now,” she told Rolling Stone. “It’s that timeless.”
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