‘Most of it was the conga preset on Prince’s drum machine’: how Fine Young Cannibals made She Drives Me Crazy

‘Prince’s Purple Rain guitar was in the corner of the studio and his lava lamps were everywhere. You couldn’t help but be inspired’

I was in a band in Hull called Akrylykz. When the Beat came to play at the Welly club we gave them a demo tape. Then they invited us to tour with them. Later, after they split up, Andy Cox and David Steele were looking for a singer for a new band and they remembered me. Fine Young Cannibals felt right straight away. After The Tube filmed us doing Johnny Come Home, we just took off. Then somebody must have noticed me on telly because suddenly I was getting film offers, and I appeared in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Scandal.

But in my heart I didn’t really want to pursue acting. It felt like being a session musician – you do your bit, then you’re not really involved. So after the band did the soundtrack for the film Tin Men, we regrouped to do a second album. All sorts of names were mentioned as producers including, I think, Phil Collins. Instead, we ended up doing The Raw and the Cooked in a way people say you should never do an album: in lots of different studios with different producers.

We did She Drives Me Crazy with David Z in Prince’s studio in Paisley Park, at which point we changed the title from She’s My Baby. I’d never sung falsetto before, but we were labelmates with Jimmy Somerville so he might have been an influence on the way I sing it. The way I elongate some of the words – “I can’t help mysel-el-elf” and so on – isn’t proper language but rules are there to be broken.