Twenty-six years after it first came out, Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome finally gets the remastered treatment it deserves.
A mad fish of a double album, the original came in the midst of the band’s bid for global domination. Frankie – Holly Johnson, Paul Rutherford, Peter Gill, Brian Nash and Mark O'Toole – had come from out of nowhere to spend a quarter of 1984 at No.1 in the UK and across Europe. This album is testament to the excesses and mayhem of Zang Tuum Tumb (ZTT) Records, and was one of three key albums from the label (the others being Who’s Afraid Of The Art Of Noise? and Propaganda’s A Secret Wish) and single handedly invented much of what we’ve taken for granted ever since.
The man behind the mixing desk and the label was Trevor Horn, the producer of the early 80s, having polished the turd that was Dollar, crafted ABC’s epic The Lexicon Of Love practically from scratch and had a hand in Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock. He also produced Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? and would later produce Cher, Grace Jones, Seal, Tina Turner, Lisa Stansfield, Pet Shop Boys, Simple Minds, Eros Ramazzotti, Charlotte Church, LeAnn Rimes and Belle & Sebastian. But it was the new pop vanguard work on ZTT that made all that possible, and the label’s first stars were undoubtedly Frankie.
Released in October 1983, Relax crept slowly up the UK charts and crawled into the Top 40 in early 1984. But when it was banned by the BBC, the song suddenly shot up to the top.
The follow-up Two Tribes courted as much controversy: spoofing the British government’s Protect And Survive nuclear attack warning and this time the accompanying provocative video that featured the then US and Soviet leaders Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko (played by actors) duking it out in a bear pit. As with Relax, many versions were made, but its nine-week run at the top was helped by a succession of 12-inch remixes, which may seem the norm now, but back then was practically unheard of. The nine-minute Annihilation version remains a classic.
After sex and violence, Frankie chose Religion as the theme for their third chart-topper and The Power Of Love and in 1985, the boys released the title track off Pleasuredome accompanied by record-company claims it would be the band’s fourth No.1. It didn’t happen, peaking at the runners-up slot.
The band would return in 1986 with a second album, Liverpool, but by then the public had moved on. No matter. Welcome To The Pleasuredome remains a highpoint of an excessive decade – the final blast of the new pop generation that had emerged in the wake of punk? Possibly. But what is fact is that no one has since matched the impact that Relax and Two Tribes achieved.
Welcome To The Pleasuredome Expanded is on ZTT/ Union Square.
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