ReviewsReview: Frankie Goes To Hollywood / Welcome to the Pleasuredome reissue
Alexis Petridis on Frankie and the new box set
“There’s a compelling argument that the new collection tells the story of Welcome To The Pleasuredome better than any previous release”
41 years ago, almost to the day, Frankie Goes To Hollywood released their debut album. To say it was eagerly-awaited is to risk understatement. It had advance sales of 1m, evidence of how completely the band had dominated British pop over the preceding 10 months, a period in which they’d released two of the biggest-selling singles in UK chart history and spent 14 weeks at Number One. For two dizzying weeks in July they found their songs not merely at Number One, but at Number Two as well, something only The Beatles had previously achieved.
And yet, Welcome To The Pleasuredome was received as something of a disappointment. In hindsight, you could say that the mixed reviews and the creeping sense that the album wasn’t selling quite as quickly as retailers had anticipated (although it shifted 250,000 copies in a week, which was clearly no one’s idea of a disaster) were the first signs that the wheels were wobbling on the previously unstoppable Frankie Goes To Hollywood juggernaut. The hardback book that accompanies this box set claims that the album’s muted reception was down to “journalists waiting to knock [Frankie] down”. There may be an element of truth in that view, although re-reading contemporary reviews you’re struck not by a backlash but by the sense of critics attempting to square the circle, keep the party going – Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ability to stir up controversy made for good copy and sold papers – and enthuse about an album they were clearly a little underwhelmed by. “By next week I’ll be tired of it, but today this ‘play’ is funny, sharp and gorgeous,” offered the NME, while Smash Hits called it “distinctly average” and “a pretty thin package” but still gave it 7 out of 10. And it also tactfully ignores the fact that doubts about the album were being expressed rather closer to home: producer Trevor Horn felt the band lacked enough strong material to fill a double album. Horn’s co-founder at ZTT Records, Paul Morley, has suggested that they shouldn’t have released an album at all: his plan for Frankie extended no further than releasing three singles – Relax, Two Tribes and The Power Of Love – at which point ZTT should “sell Frankie for five million to someone like CBS”.
There’s an argument that the album represented the last gasp of the New Pop era, a final burst of the kind of intelligent, arty, subversive British pop music that made the early 80s charts a more interesting place
Listening back to Welcome To The Pleasuredome 40 odd years on, you can see Horn’s point. The side-long title track is incredible, a grandiose and hugely exciting production extravaganza even by Horn’s contemporary standards. It contains three of the greatest singles of the decade, and terrific covers of both Edwyn Starr’s ‘War’ – previously the b-side of ‘Two Tribes’ – and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’: the latter, in context, seems to invest a macho anthem of blue collar escape with a distinct and unexpected homoerotic slant. ‘Krisco Kisses’ is fantastic, both as a song and for its shock value: it’s like the early photos of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, resplendent in gay fetishwear, in musical form. The rest is pretty good, perhaps a little rushed-sounding – there certainly isn’t another mind-blowing Horn production extravaganza in evidence – but only a ho-hum cover of ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ is obvious filler. Perhaps pretty good wasn’t good enough, given Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s position in the Autumn of 1984: for the biggest new band in British pop, nothing other than an unalloyed triumph would do.
But the passing of time has had a burnishing effect on Welcome To The Pleasuredome. There’s an argument that it represented the last gasp of the New Pop era, a final burst of the kind of intelligent, arty, subversive British pop music that made the early 80s charts a more interesting place: New Pop was already in the process of being swept away by a wave of more straightforward, less edgy, more malleable artists when Welcome To The Pleasuredome was released; the following year would see Stock Aitken And Waterman’s chart breakthrough, final evidence that times and mainstream tastes had changed. Certainly, no subsequent major pop artist has made an album remotely like Welcome To The Pleasuredome, with its sudden stylistic lurches, its juxtaposition of the technological cutting edge with straightforward rock classicism, its spoken word passages and unexpected nods towards prog rock – the title track features Yes guitarist Steve Howe, the instrumental ‘Including The Ballad Of 32’ sounds remarkably like Pink Floyd crica Wish You Were Here – and sleevenotes so wilfully pretentious, they made all the other wilfully pretentious sleevenotes Paul Morley had thus written for ZTT seem like merely a warm up for the main event: they mention Kirkegaard, Baudelaire, Nerval, Neitzsche, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Strindberg and Rimbaud among others.. From the vantage point of 2025, it seems extraordinary: the kind of mad, grandiloquent folly that no record label would countenance releasing today.
No subsequent major pop artist has made an album remotely like Welcome To The Pleasuredome
The sleevenotes of the reissue are informative and scholarly rather than studded with references to 19th Century Russian novelists and existentialist philosophers, but there’s a sense in which the new box set is in keeping with the mood around ZTT. The obvious thing to do would have been to use the space afforded by a seven-disc set to have the last word on Welcome To The Pleasuredome, to compile the umpteen contemporary FGTH remixes together in one place. But doing the obvious thing was never very ZTT. You’ll search the tracklisting in vain for the original Sex Mix of ‘Relax’ or the picture disc only seven-inch version of ‘Two Tribes’ subtitled ‘(We Don’t Want To Die)’ and in the admittedly unlikely event you’re possessed of a burning desire to hear a newly-remastered version of ‘One September Monday’ or ‘One February Friday’ – the B-side amalgams of interview quotes, sound effects and nondescript background music – you’re going to go home disappointed. If anything, the box set complicates the story further by introducing a whole new raft of hitherto-unheard remixes, ranging from a seven-inch edit of ‘Two Tribes (Annihilation)’ to ‘Relax – The Album’, over 23 minutes of dubby echo, vocal extemporisation by Holly Johnson and very of-its-era sampling. You could, if you wished, suggest that this all amounts to overkill, although, in fairness, if you’re the kind of person troubled by the number of remixes an artist releases, then Frankie Goes To Hollywood probably aren’t the band for you. Besides, there’s an impressive lack of duplication with the last deluxe version of Welcome To The Pleasuredome – the 2014 vinyl-only box set Inside The Pleasuredome – the CDs are well-sequenced enough to make listening to multiple versions of the same song enjoyable rather than a chore.
Moreover, there’s a compelling argument that the new collection tells the story of Welcome To The Pleasuredome better than any previous release. For one thing, while the provenance of the newly-released remixes is unclear, you get the distinct sense of ideas being tried out that were ultimately abandoned: a version of ‘Relax’ labelled ‘With New Fairlight And DMX Ruff Mix’ both sounds very much like the work of a producer who’d recently completed both Malcolm McLaren’s groundbreaking Duck Rock album (it opens with a snatch of rap) and features a striking key-change half-way through. For another, the opening CD of 1982-83 demos and radio sessions (all but one previously unavailable, at least officially) gives the fullest picture yet of the pre-fame Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Whether Frankie would have been anything like as successful without Horn’s perfectionist approach to production remains a very moot point indeed, but these nascent versions of ‘Relax’ (which comes interpolated with ‘In Heaven’, the song from the soundtrack of Eraserhead subsequently covered by the Pixies), ‘Two Tribes’, ‘Wish The Lads Were Here’ et al, do prove is that FGTH were already an impressively accomplished and original band before ZTT got hold of them and Horn’s studio wizardry was put to work. They occupied a space that seems to have been entirely their own: it’s hard to think of another band in 1982 that had one foot firmly rooted in the world of fidgety post-punk funk and another in the relentless bass drum pulse of the hi-nrg dance music that was sweeping the era’s gay clubs. Horn, it seems, didn’t so much create the Frankie sound as adapt what was already there, amping up the hi-nrg influence, dialling down the scratchy guitars, then supersizing the result.
It’s hard to think of another band in 1982 that had one foot firmly rooted in the world of fidgety post-punk funk and another in the relentless bass drum pulse of the hi-nrg dance music that was sweeping the era’s gay clubs
It was the right idea commercially, although Horn’s decision to exclude three fifths of the band from the recording of ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’ may well have helped hasten Frankie’s decline. Instead, they burned brightly, then sputtered out. But it was riotous fun while it lasted, a fact underlined in detail here. With a variety of Steve Wilson mixes onboard, a CD devoted to each of the singles and another to outtakes (nothing revelatory, although the extended version of the intro ‘Well…’ and two minutes of ad-libbed spoken-word vocals backed by an ambient instrumental suggest that, incredibly, the first side of the original album was the sound of Horn scaling his ideas back a bit), the box set isn’t exhaustive, but it is faintly exhausting: you struggle to imagine anyone consuming more than one CD of it in a sitting. But then, if it’s all a bit much, then that’s perfectly in keeping with the original album, and indeed the band that made it: a unique, unrepeatable British pop phenomenon.
Review by Alexis Petridis. The 7CD+blu-ray box set, 2LP vinyl and 2CD of Welcome to the Pleasuredome are out now. The SDE exclusive blu-ray – with exclusive content – follows in mid-November. Pre-order via the SDE shop using this link or the button below.
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Frankie Goes To Hollywood
6CD+Blu-ray box set
Tracklisting
Welcome to the Pleasuredome Frankie Goes To Hollywood / SDE exclusive blu-ray
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– 2025 Steven Wilson Mixes in Dolby Atmos, 5.1, Stereo, Instrumental Atmos, Instrumental 5.1 and Instrumental Stereo
– 1984 Stereo Mix
- Well
- The World Is My Oyster
- Snatch Of Fury (Ferry Across the Mersey)
- Welcome To the Pleasuredome
- Relax
- War
- Two Tribes
- Ferry (Go)
- Tag
- Born To Run
- San Jose
- Wish The Lads Were Here
- The Ballad Of 32
- Krisco Kisses
- Black Night White Light
- The Only Star in Heaven
- The Power of Love
- Bang
– Bonus tracks in Atmos, 5.1, Stereo, Instrumental Atmos, Instrumental 5.1, Instrumental Stereo
- Ferry Cross the Mersey
- Relax (Bonus)
- War (Hide Yourself)
- The World is My Oyster
- Happy Hi
- Disneyland
– Steven Wilson 30-minute ‘Supernova’ Stereo Remix of ‘Welcome to the Pleasure Dome’
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