When BBC Radio 1 controller Johnny Beetling wrote his memoirs, he highlighted three crisis points in his life at the nation station - Jane Birkin’s erotic sighing on the chart-topping “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus” in 1969, Madonna using the ‘F word’ over 40 times in an Eighties live broadcast and Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s banning after breakfast DJ Mike Read declared their 1983 debut single “Relax” ‘obscene’.
Unfortunately for him and fortunately for them, the disc had been enjoying Radio 1 airplay for many weeks previously, and banning it only increased its popularity. The five Liverpool lads with their combination of dancefloor drive and pop hooks predictably headed straight for the top of the charts… and stayed there for much of 1984. When it comes to Eighties music, theirs is still one of the first names mentioned.
But the combustible mixture of personalities involved, combined with a record company intent on pushing them and (in some critics’ opinion) the country’s moral compass to extremes, ensured that the story of Frankie Goes To Hollywood was short and explosive. They parted company in 1987 after second album “Liverpool”. This may have failed to emulate debut LP “Welcome To The Pleasuredome”, which was in every self-respecting pop fan’s Christmas stocking in 1984, but reached the top 5 regardless. So hardly a failure…
Frankie Goes To Hollywood were definitely a band in the vanguard of the video revolution that shaped pop today. Even their name was visually inspired, an illustration buy Guy Peellaert in his 1974 book Rock Dreams that showed Frank Sintra heading for the movie world’s capital. They themselves hailed from the Sixties music capital, Liverpool - a heritage that they acknowledged when covering Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “Ferry Cross The Mersey”.
The band lined up as frontman William “Holly” Johnson and Paul Rutherford, guitarist Brian “Nasher” Nash, bassist Mark O’Toole and drummer Pete “Ped” Gill. Both main male singer Johson and dancer/occansional vocalist Rutherford were homosexual, and the former, while claiming he didn’t consider himself the first openly gay pop star, cited Little Richard as his role model. “I loved the make-up and the glamour and the androgyny of what he did.”
The first the general public heard of Frankie was when a film clip of “Relax” was shown on Channel 4’s groundbreaking pop show The Tube. This caught the attention of Trevor Horn, formerly of electro-pop duo the Buggles, he was in the process of forming his own record label, Zang Tuum Tumb (understandably abbreviated to ZTT), and FGTH - if we can call them that - were soon signed up as the first acts.
Trevor Horn was a renowned studio wizard who threw in everything but the kitchen sink when helping create the released version of “Relax”. Controversy still rages as to whether other musicians, including members of Ian Dury’s Blockheads, were involved, but suffice to say that the result sounds mighty. The state-of-the-art Fairlight digital sampler was involved: one webpage dedicated to the instrument claims Horn used it to “discard most of the band’s original recorded material in favour of a sophisticated Fairlight production that spliced together multiple different versions of the track and cost £70,000 in studio time.”
Issued in November 1983, “Relax” took ten weeks to reach the top, its aspect accleared by the obliging Mike Read. Five weeks spent at Number 1 helped it sell a million-plus, while many musical and physical options kept collectors busy: 7-inch, 12-inch, cassingle and picture disc were just some of the formats. American fans sent “Relax” to Number 10 on Billboard, as an added bonus, the movie Police Academy added it to their soundtrack.
Anticipation was rife when, on 16 June 1984, the next installment of the story hit the high street. Predictably, “Two Tribes” entered at Number 1 on pre-sales alone - but it was the video, with a Ronald Regan lookalike wrestling Soviet president Chernenko that really caught the public imagination. The clip was directed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, once of 10CC and the laterr also a member of ZTT group the Art of Noise. The song’s theme, as the introduction suggests, was the supposedly impending nuclear apocalypse.
In an ironic gesture, Radio 1 were given the airplay premiere, and the single went silver in two days, gold in a week. Ultimentaly, Frankie became the first band to go platinum with their first two singles - take that, Beatles! The summer came and went, with Christmas the next sales opportunity identified by ZTT, November brought “Welcome To The Pleasuredome”, which shipped in bigger numbers than any UK album ever - and, what’s more, it was double vinyl. Notable covers among the the originals included Edwin Starr’s “War” and Bruce Springteen’s “Born To Run”.
Godley and Creme were retained to direct the clip for “The Power Of Love” - a ballad which saw the move from sex and politics to religion. There was a distinct nativity feel, but the band were kept so busy touring and promoting the product that they had no say in the matter. “The video was naff and was made while we were away,” said Holly. “I love the song, though, and people have told me they fell in love to it.”
From music through to video, “The Power Of Love” was designed to top the Yuletide charts. It hit Number 1 on schedule on 8 December, but had to give away to an even more irresistible force - Band Aid, whose “Do They Know It’s Christmas” knocked it off after a single week. However, Frankie were represented on that too, so it didn’t hurt too much.
What would 1985 bring, fans - and the band - wondered? They’d equalled Gerry and the Pacemakers record of chart-toppers with their first three singles, but the album’s title track failed to make it four, it stalled at number 2 behind Phillip Bailey and Phill Collins’ “Easy Lover”.
The Brit Awards of 1985 saw Frankie crowned Best British Newcomer, ‘Relax’ Best British Single and Trevor Horn Best British Producer. Then “Two Tribes” scooped an Ivor Novello award as Best Contemporary Song as the band hit the road for a three-week British and Irish tour. Being away from home was something Frankie would have to get used to; they were advised to spend 12 months in exile to escape punitive tax.
Come November, the focus switched to Amsterdam where they would begin the almost impossible task of creating an album to better the performance of the first. It would be exactly a year before the results were heard, and “Liverpool”, as with so many follow-ups, lacked some of the spark of the debut.
Lead single “Rage Hard” made Number 4 in advance of the album’s release, “Liverpool” itself stalled at Number 5, and disappointedly only Number 88 in the States where “Pleasuredome” had made a relevantly lofty Number 33. Back home, the pleasingly aggressive “Warriors (Of The Wasteland)” nudged into the singles Top 20.
A final British tour that started in Manchester in January 1987 was followed by a third single, “Watching The Wildlife”. When this failed to penetrate the Top 30 by more than two places, despite the gift of promotional condoms in a “safe sex” gimick, the writing was on the wall.
A final performance on Channel 4’s Saturday Live programme completed the circle from the Tube broadcast of five years earlier, and the Frankie rollercoaster was over. A split, initially intended to last nine months to let members get solo projects out of their system, became permanent.
Of the band’s members, Holly Johnson has made the biggest solo mark with a 1989 album “Blast!” that topped the UK chart. Declaring himself HIV positive, he has since constreated on his art career in preference to music and has mounted exhibitions as well as having a picture hung up in the Tate Gallery. In November 2004 a version of the band with Ryan Mallow on lead vocals performed at a Wembley Arena tribute to Trevor Horn.
Described by the Guinness Book of Hit Singles as “Fiercely marketed, controversial and regularly remixed”, Frankie Goes To Hollywood sold five million singles in the UK alone, and by the turn of the millenium seven single remixes had kept their name in the UK Top 75. We declare our second disc to some of these. At Xmas 2012, ‘The Power Of Love” hit the UK Top 40 yet again thanks to the wake of a stripped-down cover by Gabrielle Aplin that made Number 1 thanks to its use in a TV ad.
Back in 1984, future Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant interviewed the band as they released “Two Tribes”. “Our music is really good,” said Holly in response to Tennant’s general suggestions of hype. “Controversy is something extra, but our records will always stand up on their own.”
Exactly three decades later, you have the opportunity to turn up the volume and put those words to the test.
- Michael Heatley
