Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Welcome To The Pleasuredome (1984)

Embarrassingly juvenile disco/arena rock with lots of covers and I love it - well, every so often. I didn't own this album in the '80s, but I dubbed a cassette copy of a friend's 2 LP set in early '85. I'm sure the group members must have contributed something during the recording, but this is a Trevor Horn album from start to finish. From what I can tell, the backing band were really studio aces from Horn's camp, including Art Of Noise bandmates Anne Dudley and JJ Jeczalik, and two former bandmates from Yes: Steve Howe and Trevor Rabin. As a result, it closely resembles an Art of Noise album. From what I read, the group was a much bigger deal overseas than in the US. Only the single Relax cracked the US Top 40, peaking at #10; with Two Tribes peaking at #43 and the title track at #48. My CD is the 2000 issue with 2 bonus tracks and excellent liner notes.

Here's info that I've cobbled together concerning the band's unique name: Singer Holly Johnson claims the group's name was derived from a page from The New Yorker magazine, featuring the headline "Frankie Goes to Hollywood" and a picture of Frank Sinatra. In actuality, the magazine page Johnson referred to was a pop art poster by the late Guy Peellaert:

Press of the time:

• Billboard: "a marriage of slick, old-line disco with tribal rock primitivism"
• Rolling Stone (★★★): "a work of extraordinary studio imagination and perverse commercial ambition dedicated to the elevation of hip agitprop and homoerotic self-absorption"
• Smash Hits (7 out of 10): "A pretty thin package at times, but it still seems a real adventure."
• Stereo Review: "the most absorbing new rock album of 1985"
• Robert Christgau (C): "on the whole Frankie are a marginally competent arena-rock band who don't know how to distinguish between effeminacy and pretension"

Album chart peaks:

• US Billboard 200: #33
• Billboard Pop CD: #29
• CashBox: #20
• Rolling Stone: #19

Tracks: I like the originals Welcome To The Pleasure Dome, Relax, Two Tribes and Wish The Lads Were Here. The covers are good because they're all so campy: War, Born to Run and Do You Know The Way To San Jose? The band had a power ballad-type hit in the UK with The Power Of Love, but that song (like most power ballads) doesn't do anything for me. The rest are filler and average filler at that. Skip the bonus tracks.

Personal Memory Associated with this CD: This reminds me of early 1985 and college friends, particularly Buffalo Tom and Larry, who were roommates in the dorm room next to mine. The hype surrounding this group was rather limited in the US and I would imagine even more so in rural East Texas where we were living at the time, but we got caught up in it a little bit, probably because of the videos on MTV. I didn't have a "Frankie Say Relax" t-shirt, but I still own a button (below) which is beginning to show some age.

Around that time, in a Freshman English course, we were assigned to read Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" which begins:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree

I'm sure that was just serendipity because I doubt the professor was listening to FGTH and had probably been assigning that poem for 20+ years. (I'm giving myself bonus points for a Xanadu reference)