Songfacts®:

• Try to name some of the artists that had two #1 hits in 1989 and you might come up with Phil Collins, New Kids On The Block, Roxette, and maybe even Paula Abdul (who had 3!), but we doubt you'll remember that Fine Young Cannibals followed up "She Drives Me Crazy" with another chart-topper: "Good Thing."
  
  Both songs are from their second album, The Raw & The Cooked. Their next single, "Don't Look Back," reached #11, but they never again reached the Top 40. In fact, The Raw & The Cooked was their last album; the group is from Birmingham, England, but made an ill-fated move to America in 1990 to focus on that market. Fissions formed, and they broke up soon after.
• "Good Thing" has a '60s sound because it was written for a 1987 movie called Tin Men that was set in that decade. The film was directed by Barry Levinson, who asked Fine Young Cannibals to write songs for it after hearing their music in Jonathan Demme's 1986 movie Something Wild. Levinson wanted fresh music that would still convey the vibe of '60s-era Baltimore, which is portrayed in the film.
  
  "The sound of The Fine Young Cannibals has a sparseness to it," says Levinson in the film's production notes, "and reminds me very much of the uncluttered music of the early '60s. It's somewhat of a basic sound, yet it has an unusual kind of richness in combining modern rhythms with traditional soul music."
  
  The group wrote and recorded three other songs for the film ("Social Security," "Hard As It Is" and "Tell Me What") and appear on camera as the house band. So if you're keeping score, we have an '80s band from Birmingham, England portraying a '60s group from Baltimore. Somehow, it works.
• Fine Young Cannibals rose from the ashes of the UK band The Beat, known in America as The English Beat. The Beat had a number of UK hits, including "Mirror in the Bathroom," "Too Nice To Talk To" and a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Tears Of A Clown." When the band broke up in 1983, guitarists David Steele and Andy Cox went on to form FYC with a new vocalist, Roland Gift, whom they carefully chose after eight months of listening to cassettes.
• At the height of their popularity, Fine Young Cannibals were hounded to accept sponsorship deals, including a ridiculous one involving this song. "The worst thing was they wanted us to remake the 'Good Thing' video with Hondas instead of Vespas," David Steele told Q magazine in 1990. "I used to hang out with scooter kids and to them the biggest joke in the whole world was the Honda scooter."
• TV presenter and former Squeeze member Jools Holland played piano on "Good Thing," for which he was paid £150.
• The song first appeared in the movie Tin Men in 1987 but there was no soundtrack to the film, so it wasn't available. It wasn't released until 1989 on Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw & The Cooked album.
• Be sure to listen to the lyrics before putting "Good Thing" on a mixtape for your sweetie. The guy in the song is all out of sorts because the one good thing in his life - his girlfriend - has up and left him, and now he's all out of sorts. In the vein of "She Drives Me Crazy," we get the sense that this guy is a little unhinged. Note that the girl has gone "somewhere I can't follow her."