Gift Wrapped for a Ruckus

By JAY COCKS

There is a gentleman with a gun in the street, and he has come to call. He won't bother with the bell, though. He'll announce himself by shooting the front door full of holes. The guy with the gat is Roland Gift, lead singer of a nifty rock band called the Fine Young Cannibals, and movie star aborning. In that scene from Scandal, a just opened cinema chronicle of Britain's Profumo- Keeler scandal of the early '60s, Gift is doing onscreen the same sort of number he's been running on the music scene: making a little room for himself and raising a major ruckus.

Gift has made his biggest noise on the record charts with the Cannibals. Their latest album, The Raw & the Cooked, has sold 3 million copies worldwide since January. The first single, She Drives Me Crazy, hit No. 1 on the U.S. charts, and a second, Good Thing, is just breaking. The band also features a couple of dexterous guitarists, Andy Cox and David Steele, formerly of the English Beat. But it's Gift everyone is noticing at the moment. He's got a supple way with a tune, and a promising presence onscreen.

That's treacherous turf, rocking and acting. From Elvis to Sting, one medium seems to undercut the other. But if they can be reconciled, then Roland Gift has the cool to bring it off. One wants to retain a little mystery as a . performer and steer clear of typecasting, especially along color lines. In fact, his father was black and his mother white, but further details of the family history are dear. The middle child in a family of five, Gift, 28, grew up in Hull, a small port city in the industrial north. "My father died when I was very young," he says. "My mother's a dealer. Not crack. She deals in clothes, jewelry and other secondhand stuff."

Gift would prefer to talk about something else. Swimming, say. Or fencing, a sport he's just taken up. But questions of a personal nature are skirted, skimmed, finally finessed. He'd sooner study the lunch menu. "Do you eat cod?" he asks, looking up from the day's offerings. "Well, I don't. I eat haddock instead. Cod is full of worms. I once worked as a fish gutter, and I was supposed to pick the worms out. That was my job. But since you had to fill a certain quota of boxes in order to get paid, you often didn't bother to get all the worms out."

However he feels around cod, Gift has a smooth, soulful way around a tune. His voice sounded a little uncertain on a remake of Elvis' Suspicious Minds, from the first Cannibals album, Fine Young Cannibals, released in 1985. The sensual assurance Gift acquired on The Raw & the Cooked may come from some special attention he has been lavishing on his vocal cords. "I do go to see someone now and again for guidance about my voice," he reports. "But it's for moral guidance, because I think there's more to singing than just songs." A Cannibals tune like I'm Not Satisfied has an elegant, low-down savor that has little to do with moral authority, however. It works so nicely, as the album co-producer David Z. explains, "because it bridges the gap between pop and alternative music." It also hits home because of Gift's vocals.

He can aim high when he sings and still hit below the belt. His secret is simple, elemental. Even laid-back, he sounds sexy, an inborn talent that was nurtured by some early vocational training. "You're talking to someone who used to be a male stripper," he says. "It was all show business, and it's probably helped with my presentation." Just so no one gets too comfy with what to expect of Gift, he has signed up to do a production of Romeo and Juliet later this year in the north of England, and is reading the script for a part in a Sylvester Stallone movie. "I've been asked," Gift reports, "to play one of his muscles." He smiles. Sure, he'll give it a go. And maybe be good at it too. There may be a sufficiency of talent, but there is certainly no time to talk.

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York and Nancy Seufert/London