‘Most of it was a pre-made conga song on Prince’s drum machine’: How a young cannibal made beautiful ‘drive me crazy’ | culture

Roland giftSinger, songwriter

I was in a band in Hull called Akrylykz. When the Beat came to play at Welly’s Club, we gave them a demo tape. Then they invited us to tour with them. Later, after they broke up, Andy Cox and David Steele were looking for a singer for a new band and they remembered me. The young cannibal felt beautiful instantly. After we shot The Tube while we were doing Johnny Come Home, we just took off. Then someone must have noticed me on TV because suddenly I was getting offers for films, 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 a session musician – you do your homework, and then you’re not really involved. So after the band did the Tin Men soundtrack, we regrouped to make a second album. All sorts of names were mentioned as producers including, I think, Phil Collins. Instead, we ended up producing The Raw and the Cooked in a way that people say you should never make an album: in a lot of different studios with different producers.

We did She Drives Me Crazy with David Z at 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 record label mates with Jimmy Somerville so he probably had an influence on the way I sing. The way I elongate some words – “I can’t help mysel-el-elf” etc – is not proper language but the rules are there and they need to be broken.

She Drives Me Crazy went to number five in the UK and was the first of the top two in the US, but it was bittersweet for me. When it became a big hit, I was reading Money by Martin Amis and my girlfriend kicked me out, just like in the book. On the other hand, we always talked about wanting to make music that people would listen to many years later – and that’s exactly what happened.

David Steelebass, keyboards, drum machine, songwriter

We were playing in the studio when we came up with what became Scum and beat She Drives Me Crazy, although it was a lot harder at that point. None of us really liked it and it went into the box of unfinished songs. ‘Good Thing’ was going to be our ‘big single’ but London Records wanted us to work with other producers on other tracks. We told them we wouldn’t work with anyone else unless it was the prince. They said “We can’t have the prince!” But he suggested it to his engineer, David Z, and said we could do it at Prince’s studio, Paisley Park. When we sent David some songs, including the beginnings of “She Drives Me Crazy,” he said, “This is the song! Come on.”

David allowed us to use Prince’s room and all of his equipment. Purple Rain’s guitar was in the corner, his lava lamps were everywhere, and Sly and the Family Stone were using the mixing desk. You can’t help but feel inspired in that situation, so we tried things like putting keyboards through Prince’s pedals. Andy played Prince Rickenbacker’s guitar. David tells a very complicated story about how he got the snare sound by opening it and all sorts of things, but most of it was just a conga beat that was pre-set on Prince’s drum machine.

When Roland later came from London to sing, he didn’t have enough words. I thought about asking Prince to write some for us, but that would have turned it into a Prince song. Instead, “She Drives Me Crazy” was sitting in my notebook of song titles. Roland and I finished lyrics like William Burroughs pieces – plundering a line from another song of ours and such. Rowland put on a falsetto and a regular vocal parallel, a trick Prince used on “If I Was Your Girlfriend.”

The prince was there but we were shy and didn’t want to disturb him. After ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ became the first single recorded at Paisley Park, he played it at some after-parties and we were supposed to meet him properly. We never did, but sometimes it’s good to keep a little mystery.