“She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals

"She Drives Me Crazy" was the first single from The Raw & the Cooked, Fine Young Cannibals' second and last album, and it's one of the oddest, catchiest sounds of its day: a stiff, clanking drum-machine beat, a gnarled little guitar figure and Roland Gift's voice leaping into a strangled, sky-high yelp.

Gift wrote it with David Steele, and Andy Cox handles the drum machine, guitar and tambourine. The band co-produced it with David Z., who also engineered, and London Records put it out.

It gave them their biggest hit at home, number five in the UK, and did even better in America, where it spent a week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the first of two chart-toppers there, with "Good Thing" to follow. It went to number one in Australia, Austria, Canada, Israel, New Zealand and Spain as well, and came with two different videos, one directed by Philippe Decouflé and one by Pedro Romhanyi. Decades on, Time Out ranked it at number 28 among the 50 best songs of the '80s, and Billboard put it at number 77 on its list of the 500 best pop songs of all time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.