Important album gets important boxset: the definitive word on the definitive album of the 80s has arrived
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome To The Pleasuredome Deluxe Edition (UMR)
★★★★★
Of course Trevor Horn is a genius. But part of Horn’s talent is in seeing ideas through to their maximum potential. And this gigantic boxset of possibly the ultimate 80s album reveals how the initial idea of Frankie Goes To Hollywood was absolutely not Trevor Horn’s.
The key disc in Welcome To The Pleasuredome Deluxe Edition’s 7CD+Blu-Ray set (Steven Wilson’s new mix of the album is also on 2LP) is the early years CD1, because ZTT latched on to Relax, Two Tribes and The Power Of Love when they were already sounding fantastic.
Holly Johnson sings like a dream: powerful, commanding but also lean and hungry. It’s a very rare combination.
It’s as important, given the endless claims of how they didn’t play on the album itself, that Mark O’Toole and Ped Gill were a mighty rhythm section, too. Before the precocious Brian Nash joined, O’Toole’s rolling bass is a lead instrument, and he unwittingly invents Blur’s Alex James during his muscular playing in the first 1982 demo of Relax.
All that Frankie maybe lacked, and presumably is why labels were too blind to start a bidding war, was an obvious direction: Love Has Got A Gun (eventually becoming Wish) is pure funk, Krisco Kisses is frantic post-punk, Two Tribes is all speedy urgency, Welcome To The Pleasuredome louche disco, Relax on John Peel all these things and more.
The Ultimate 80s Album
The variety helped when it came to the endless remixes later. For all ZTT’s steely vision, never forget these songs were always adaptable for whatever flavour you wanted to enhance on any given 12″ (or cassingle.) The 23-minute The Album version of Relax is a marvel for keeping your attention.
The more you’re bombarded by Frankie, the less obvious they sound. You could plausibly theorise Paul Rutherford and Johnson’s gay messaging – so upfront and explicit, it’s possibly even less likely to get near the mainstream now – being realised by three “lads” is why it’s so out there: their lengthy, diverse mix of influences can be detected if you want, but it’s more fun to just let it all blast you into another dimension.
While there’s a CD each dedicated to Relax and Two Tribes remixes, the boxset is at its most adventurous when alighting on the less familiar songs. What a great B-side Happy Hi! was, a carefree breeze where Johnson is at his most casually convincing, while his laugh in the mixes of The World Is My Oyster is the biggest Proustian rush anyone will experience across all seven hours of music.
Forget the stories of feuds and its long gestation. Ignore the chart-manipulating stories of their many single formats: here is why Frankie were so important. How brilliant that they were so massive and so themselves.
Classic Pop may earn commission from the links on this page, but we only feature products we think you will enjoy.
