Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Welcome To The Pleasuredome

I occasionally like to remind myself that nostalgia hasn’t got the best of me yet. I’ll force something back down my throat that I originally was lukewarm too before coming to my senses and selling the goddamn album to a used record store. It’s like I think “Oh! Twenty years have passed, and a few songs on the record are pretty decent, so maybe I’ll give it another spin.” You know, just cause I miss that moment, that era, or that girl I was trying to make out with in my ’74 MGB.
Most recently, my thoughts came to Welcome To The Pleasuredome, the debut album from Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It was a double record set-that means it has TWO RECORDS in it-which is either pretty admirable if the band in question is pretty good and going through a manic creative phase or pretty pretentious if the band in question is Frankie Goes To Fucking Hollywood.
Let me digress for one moment and tell you the story of when I first heard of Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
In my hometown, there was a fair amount of friendly competition among music lovers who tried to be the first kid on the block to discover *insertfamousband* before they actually became famous.
I’d like to take credit for Inxs.
Brad Brody (not his real name, but close enough) can take credit for Motley Crue.
And my best friend Todd can take credit for Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
I don’t even know if he was trying to discover something new to unleash on the rest of us, but I do know he spent a few late nights listening to a countdown show from the BBC highlighting the Top 10 songs in England. Seriously, the dude had to stay up past midnight on a school night to catch this show, and out of intent or insomnia, he came to school the next day totally stoked about a song called “Relax” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
His excitement was evident, but he had no proof of the song’s power. He promised to record it on cassette to let everyone hear its power. He practically recorded the entire show just to get the recording of “Relax” to play it for the rest of us and even offered to dub it to another cassette for me because he was confident that I would love it as much as he did.
The following week, it was banned from the show, and this story made his find even more intriguing.
He even went so far as to special order the 12” single for “Relax” before it was released stateside. Of course, by the time he got his product, the song was beginning to air on MTV and become a hit in its own right here in the USA. He could have easily bought the domestic single for about $10 cheaper about a week after ordering it from the record store.
Nonetheless, this was his baby and it was indeed catchy enough-and naughty enough for all of us to giggle at. He was most certainly the first in line to get ready for the band’s debut album Pleasuredome and was probably the first one to fully comprehend the total disappointment that it provided listeners.
For to even slice Welcome To The Pleasuredome down to a single album would still require a few bits of filler, a few tunes of mediocrity and a pair of great singles. Yes, I said “Great” and yes, one of those is “Relax.”
The other is “The Power Of Love,” a wonderfully subdued ballad that should have been bigger than the follow-up to “Relax,” a song called “Two Tribes” which happened to have a better video pushing it into the top twenty here in the states.
“Two Tribes,” another naughty track called “Krisco Kisses” and “Black Night White Light” manage to round out a relatively solid-but never noteworthy-debut album.
But it isn’t a single album effort and, as a result, isn’t a “relatively sold” debut album. Christ, it’s not even a debut album by Frankie Goes To Hollywood when you get right down to it. Welcome To The Pleasuredome is an over-the-top exercise in producer Trevor Horn’s ego. Seemingly unsatisfied with his own work in the faceless Art Of Noise project, Horn shuttles together a bunch of untalented young saps under a hastily constructed band with about a half-a-dozen songs between the lot of them.
Horn extends the piss out of each one with drawn out refrains, countless measures of instrumental parts, and pointless arrangements that are obviously the work of no one named Frankie and no one from Hollywood.
He places vocalist Holly Johnson in front of the entire fiasco, and Johnson is seemingly unaware or just flat out doesn’t give a shit that he himself is a man of questionable talent. His range is weak and his penchant for enunciating anything that has to do with cock, balls, or ejaculation only proves how subtlety is nowhere to be found in his vocabulary.
Which is probably why Horn put him there, but it doesn’t explain why he couldn’t have trimmed Welcome To The Pleasuredome down to at least to a point where there might have been an interesting debate about the possibility of its greatness. Because for me to suggest otherwise would be grounds for musical mutiny and I would most certainly have to take a drug test just to think such a thing.
When the listener hasn’t grown tired of such shallow and continuous sloganeering (“The world is my oyster!” “Shooting stars never stop, even when they reach the top!” “Live life like a diamond ring!”) they’re treated to utterly pointless covers. “Born To Run,” “Do You Know The Way To San Jose” and “War” all make a pit stop, only because Horn must have realized that-as stated early-Frankie Goes To Hollywood only came to the studio with a half dozen actual songs.
If the world is indeed your oyster, spend two bucks at ITunes to get the pair of awesome pearls from Pleasuredome (“Relax” and “The Power Of Love”) and save the rest for one of Horn’s real gems from the 80’s.