Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Welcome to the singles poll

2 tribes 4 ever

Had to go with "Two Tribes." One of the best singles of the 80s.

Also, didn't know "Pleasuredome" was a single. The album version was like 10 minutes long, wasn't it? And Steve Howe was on it!

For all of the delight there is to be had in "Relax" getting some explicit descriptions of gay sex onto Top 40 radio--and at the height of the wave of AIDS-era homophobia--"Two Tribes" is still the way stronger track.

There's a prize for anyone who can hum Watching The Wildlife. Just listened to it again and I still have no idea how it goes. What an ignominious way to go out.

Watching The Wildlife is my favourite of the Liverpool album singles! I'm sort of tempted to vote for it, but can't really justify anything other than another Two Tribes vote

the "Two Tribes" remix with the long-ass name is one of the greatest recordings anytime anywhere, but these days I wonder if and when I marry Jake Gyllenhaal I'd use "The Power of Love" as Our Song.

never forget:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYDhjuq08Fg

Yeah, this is absolutely 'Two Tribes' ... it was the first track that I thought of when I saw the thread title!

I can't help but think of how much better Welcome To The Pleasuredome would have been if they'd condensed the record down to a single album and every track featured production as awesome as the singles. Also, in the case of 'Two Tribes', I often feel it go on for much much longer. That groove could go on forever and I wouldn't mind.

I was obsessed with Holly Johnson's Blast as small child, both the music and the album art, probably my favourite album when I was five- it was sometime later that I realised that Frankie was a much bigger deal. I don't think I've ever heard Paul Rutherford's solo record... apparently Brian 'Nasher' Nash released two solo albums in 1999 and 2002 as well

had no idea Blast hit #1 in England!

To be honest, if I had to choose between Frankie and Propaganda, I'd probably choose Propaganda.

'Blast' was one of the first albums my parents bought on CD, if not the first, and I have clear memories of spending a lot of time holding the disc up to the light to watch the rainbow patterns on the surface, and being fascinated by pressing buttons to make the CD tray appear and disappear, make particular tracks start playing etc

rainbow patterns on a Holly Johnson album geddit

never forget:

He's cranky because She's the Boss was being met with an overwhelming shrug.

When I saw them in 1984, everything was played live (except for obvious things like Reagan quotes and "Mine is the last voice you will ever hear").

Also, this happened:
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/29/arts/rock-concert-halted-when-floor-collapses.html

morbsy say RELAX

weren't the Reagan + Prince Charles impressions by Chris Barrie? he did Reagan on Spitting Image as well, so I presume it's also his voice in the video for 'Land of Confusion' by Genesis

Is "Two Tribes" the best '80s Cold War track? I love lots of them -- "Ronnie Talk to Russia," "99 Luftballons," even the dumb Sting ones. But can't think of any better.

Prince had a few, I'm partial to 'Sign O The Times'. 'Exhuming McCarthy' for that matter.
Y'all are really gonna vote for something besides Relax?

Two Tribes is the Killing Joke of 80s dancefloor cuts

I like this thread, think I would have to go with Let's All Make A Bomb or Man at C&A personally

100 80s songs about fear of nuclear holocaust

What about 'Five Minutes To Midnight'?

Jagger's movements in that interview clip are hilarious!

christ the Power Of Love 12" is an incredible thing. once you get past the daft Chris Barrie spoken intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX9UJAX7nWM

Jagger's movements in that interview clip are hilarious!

― Turrican

if you watch the whole thing you'll note he's pretty drunk

Is he trying to show off his mullet or something? Which, even for the mid 80s, is a fucking awful mullet.

Voted 'Relax', partly because of the hardly concealed homophobic uproar, but mainly because it's a great track and it also has certain memories for me personally. 'Two Tribes' a close second though. Possibly the best 80s WW3 we're-all-gonna-get-nuked track because unlike practically other song of that ilk, it really doesn't care, which for me sums up me and my peers experience of the time - we lived close enough to a high profile nuclear target that we'd have been vapourised, so why worry about it? Also there's the great video with Reagan and Chernenko kicking each other up the arse, and the capitalist references in the lyrics ("money's all that you can score").

'Two Tribes' has such a fantastic guitar line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBWY8oAnnww

"We're living in a land... where SEX and HORROR are the NEW GODS" couldn't have been better if John Lydon had sung it. Also the performance of that song on Top of The Pops, where they're throwing dollar bills in the air, might be one of my favourite 80s TOTP moments. Not least because my mother walked in the room and exclaimed that she thought that Holly Johnson looked like "a rat". Which made me love the band even more.

It's between The Power Of Love and Two Tribes for me but those four Pleasuredome singles are all 10/10.

I have a lot of time for Rage Hard. Surprised it killed their career the way it did. They should have put For Heaven's Sake out as a single from Liverpool. Easily the best song on there.

I remember being excited when 'Warriors of the Wasteland' was about to be released, but when I heard it I was disappointed? Is there any other band with as steep a diminishing returns curve as Frankie? The first three singles are great singles, while the next two are great album tracks, but not so great as singles. But then the last two singles are practically B side and album filler, respectively.

think warriors of the wasteland needs recognition for including the refrain 'warriors - what a wasteman'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDhiYdFjFVU

He's cranky because She's the Boss was being met with an overwhelming shrug.

Also isn't that album really Fairlight/Synclavier heavy? So the whole thing about Frankie not playing any of their instruments* is a bit hypocritical.

(*they could actually play, but for some reason decided not to)

as a kid I liked Welcome to the Pleasuredome the best of the singles, since it was both inexplicable and cinematic. but I liked all of them! I haven't listened to anything except Relax for ages. credit to my dad for buying me the album and not really giving a shit if it was appropriate for a pre-teen, even after seeing a few of the videos.

What's everyone's favourite version of 'Two Tribes', anyway? I'm thinking the Annihilation Mix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHFPuH5iEww

(*they could actually play, but for some reason decided not to)

"Born to Run" is probably the best example of how cracking they were as a unit (though weirdly and disappointingly faithful to the original). Which reminds me, they played live on SNL, but the sound was so awful that they would've benefited from backing tracks.

I voted for Relax due to OD'ing on Two Tribes a few years back... but listening to the Annihilation remix again it should have been Two Tribes. What a great backing track.

As Paul Morley said in one of the interviews above, they had the idea of making Welcome To The Pleasuredome a double album, but didn't have enough material to fill a double album with and had to think about how to make it work. One thing that they could have done was do with the singles what they did with the title track and stretch the tracks out and throw all the ideas that they had in the songs. A 13 minute version of 'Two Tribes' keeping the basic song and throwing in some of the ideas from the Annihilation mix would have been fucking perfection - given how groove-based 'Two Tribes' and 'Relax' are, I think that approach would have worked, rather than bulking out the album with cover versions and relatively underproduced hastily-written originals. It's clear to me when listening to the album which songs got the most production attention (the singles) and which didn't.

a fair few of the originals (Krisco Kisses, Black Night, Oyster, maybe more?) were written some years before too mind
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/sessions/1980s/1983/Dec03frankiegoestohol/

took me years to suss what Krisco Kisses was about.

Ha, when I saw them, Holly Johnson introduced the song by saying, "We all know what Crisco is used for, don't we?" I thought, "um...for cooking...?" I had no idea. I was 12.

The power of love ahead of welcome to the pleasuredome then two tribes.

am I right in thinking "Two Tribes" got massive MTV play? It did shit on the chart though.

I dunno how Frankie fared on the American chart... here, they were big for a time. 'Relax', 'Two Tribes' and 'The Power Of Love' all UK #1's, 'Welcome To The Pleasure Dome' a UK #2, even 'Rage Hard' was a UK #4. Welcome To The Pleasuredome of course was a UK #1 album.

Then suddenly, 'Warriors (Of The Wasteland)' peaked at #19 and Liverpool peaked at #5... one more single later ('Watching The Wildlife', a UK #28) and it was all over... although both 'Relax' and 'The Power Of Love' were later reissued in the '90s and went Top 10 again.

oh I'm aware of how big those three singles were in England; from all I've read and been told Frankiemania strangled the press and public for most of 1984.

"Relax" eventually hit #10 in the US, but iirc, it wasn't until mid-1985.

"Two Tribes" got to #43, and "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" topped out at #48 (surprised it got that high, tbh).

None of the Liverpool singles charted, but "Warriors of the Wasteland" was up for some MTV award.

weird how Relax was in Body Double, seemed mega-incongruous there.

xxp:

Indeed, and a lot of the success of Frankie was down to the way that the project was presented and the controversy it generated. It seemed like everything about Frankie was completely thought out - from the production, to the sleeves, to the videos... and I guess Horn and Morley had far more to do with that than the band themselves. There were happy accidents, I suppose... such as Mike Read banning 'Relax' on Radio One, but on the whole I think that a lot of the Frankie project was designed to push buttons anyway. I'm sure the band members wouldn't enjoy Frankie being referred to as a "project", but that's essentially what they were, I think. The band came up with the raw materials, but the rest was essentially down to ZTT. That it all fell apart isn't a great surprise to me, given from what I've read about the whole Frankie-ZTT thing.

the Hibakusha mix of "Two Tribes" is titanic obv

I've always been fascinated by American perceptions of British acts, how British acts fare in America compared to here and the differences between the American chart and the British chart. I guess that here, with us being such a tiny island, things have the opportunity to "break" much faster here - national news travels fast, fads come and go faster, a band can tour the UK in absolutely no time at all compared to the time it would take to tour the US properly. Therefore, in Frankie's case, when the BBC banned 'Relax' on one of the main radio stations in the UK, everyone knew about it and it helped the single take off. Breaking the American market seems a hell of a lot harder, and seems to take a hell of a lot more work. It seems to me that most of the British bands that have successfully made some headway in America are the ones that are willing to spend months and months touring there and building up a live following and even relocating there so they can work more effectively in America and keep up a greater rapport with the American record company.

I have no idea about the way that Frankie were perceived in America, but here they were seen as being quite edgy at the time. I can't help but feel that cultural differences were a barrier for a lot of '80s synth acts or acts like Frankie in America... as I understand it, British synthpop was perceived as being "English fag music" or something along those lines in America? That it was perceived as unmanly and effeminate and... dare I say it... not real music? That it was perceived as not being as "authentic" as, say, Bruce Springsteen or John Cougar Mellencamp? I guess that while synthpop was perceived that way by some here, it was on the whole seen as something new, different and interesting.

It fascinates me how many British synthpop albums came out from the late '70s up until the mid '80s, and how many of them were both commercially successful here at the time and have gone down as being classics of the genre, yet when I dig for American synthpop from the same time period, I always find myself coming up short. Equally, it's fascinating to me that America got Depeche Mode right around the time that they were arguably making their best music, whereas the British perception of Depeche Mode was vastly different. I mentioned earlier that, with us being a tiny island, things have the opportunity to "break" much faster here, and I think in Depeche Mode's case it worked the other way and was a bit of a curse - they had the initial success with Speak & Spell and the singles from that album, and even though Vince Clarke left and they'd musically moved on, the image of the fresh-faced four piece singing 'Just Can't Get Enough' lingered in peoples minds for a long time. They had to really work hard to shake that image off in the UK, and I actually don't think they properly did until the Songs Of Faith and Devotion/Ultra period. The success of Depeche Mode in America is also fascinating to me in the sense that I seem to notice a definite increase in synthpop being made by American acts in the late '80s, whereas, as I said, I struggle to find much in terms of American synthpop from the late '70s up until the mid '80s. It seemed like a very cultish genre there, whereas here it was huge from the moment Gary Numan appeared with 'Are "Friends" Electric?' in the late '70s.

I was in junior high (in America) when Frankie emerged. There were a couple of kids in my school with those "FRANKIE SAY RELAX" T-shirts, and when I say a couple I mean seriously one or two. I remember hearing both "Relax" and "Two Tribes" on the radio. I only knew one kid who actually owned the Welcome to the Pleasuredome album, though. And when I saw Body Double on VHS, like, four years later, I remember having a "Huh! I remember that song!" moment. But I don't think I realized the band themselves were in the movie.

Yeah the Frankie Says t-shirts appeared not long after the Wham "Choose Life" t-shirts. Nobody knew what the hell any of it meant. We didn't have a weekly music press like NME and Melody Maker to explain it all to us.

Voted The Power of Love b/c such a gorgeous love song

Tom's Freaky Trigger write-ups of the trio are magnificent.

I can't help but think of how much better /Welcome To The Pleasuredome/ would have been if they'd condensed the record down to a single album and every track featured production as awesome as the singles. Also, in the case of 'Two Tribes', I often feel it go on for much much longer. That groove could go on forever and I wouldn't mind.

Which is why I believe the two best single mixes—by some distance—are "Welcome to the Pleasuredome (Fruitness Mix)" and "Two Tribes (Hibakusha Mix)" – both are thrilling, dramatic in a narrative sense and sonically rich as hell. Love them both equally.

tribes, c'mon

Back cover of "Two Tribes" 12", including the chart of estimated deaths within nuclear blast zones:

http://artofztt.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FGTH-12ZTAS3-12-back-cover.jpg

First heard the annihilation mix in a record store and was blown away. The whole package--the song, the video, the record art--made it convincing that this could be one of the last pop songs before civilization ended.

Just fell into a half-hour of figuring out where the "Mine is the last voice" voice came from:

The voice-over guy who narrated this recorded the line especially for the song:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive

I completely and totally agree - presentation was a huge and important part of the whole Frankie experience and made those records feel that they were something more than "just another record"

While I do find myself often disagreeing with Paul Morley's opinions on bands or albums that I happen to rate quite highly and I often find myself actively annoyed by the manner in which he expresses his opinions, particularly when he suddenly crops up as a "talking head" on a TV show, I think he really nailed his role in the whole Frankie project.

"Welcome to the Pleasuredome (Fruitness Mix)"

checked various reissues/packages.
this version does not appear to have been given a recent dust down, and i dont think i have ever heard this one.

oh, and i had to vote for TT.

i love WTTPD in all its various forms, but TT is just insanely good in its full annihilation/Hibakusha forms.

Speaking of 'the voice over guy' here's an out-take from the Pleasuredome deluxe edition

http://open.spotify.com/track/5i9Zt5HcrZvxBK9BjVHySO

The Pleasuredome Fruitness Mix is on the Twelve Inches comp I think. Possibly slightly truncated, sacrilege no doubt. The Pleasurefix version is also excellent; more or less an instrumental of the album version.

Feel like voting Rage Hard for the "Young Person's Guide" version and cos it's not as overplayed (for me). Supposedly originally voiced by Joanna Lumley before she decided it was a little too fruity or something. I remember hearing the Two Tribes Hibakusha mix on Janice Long or something one night but not being able to track down a copy at the time.

The Pleasuredome Fruitness Mix is on the Twelve Inches comp I think

Is that the recent ZTT 12" compilation series, or on a dedicated FGTH 12" compilation (there have been a couple, but they were normally shitty modern remixesso avoided them !)

It's an early 00s FGTH comp. There are some remixes I think but you get the full 16 minute Relax, Hibakusha, Fruitness and other OGs, so...

ahh .. thats one i will have missed.
will keep an eye out - ta.
didn't think it was on the new reissues/compilation series.

Yeah, it used to be frighteningly rare or some such (xposts the Hibakusha one), now you can get it for a tenner or thereabouts.

(I do have one)

(What's a Hibakusha anyway?)

It's the Japanese term for those that survived the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

ta

ok, I had never listened to the full 12" version of POL till now.

thankfully it's on the 2cd Sex Mix set, which I have it in the archive, and not paid much attention.
at the time, instead of the usual 12" I got the edition that had a gatefold sleeve, and some nice glossy xmas cards.

not knowing it at the time, the tracklisting was totally different to the usual 12" (doh ! ztt ! of course !).

http://www.discogs.com/Frankie-Goes-To-Hollywood-The-Power-Of-Love/release/6324244

now that I have heard the full 9 minute version, its clear that the opening 3 single run by this band was definitely one of the all time best.

as wonderful as the 2cd compilation Sex Mix is, they could have left off the sodding xmas crap ..

That gatefold POL has the "fix" versions and the full The World Is My Oyster rock out and so is totally worthwhile.

ooh totally ..
just was surprised yesterday by the 9 min version of POL as I had not heard it before (well, not knowingly as I had not paid much attention to the Sex Mix 2cd set, as I bought it and filed it thinking I had heard it all !)

that said, I still think that the annihilation mix of TT is one of the best 12" records ever ..

I wish the extended PoL didn't have that "funny" intro though.

agree totally, the chris barry crap detracts from the excellence.
I guess they (i.e. trevor et al) were flying high after the success of the voice overs of TT.
but the fact is, they do not suit POL at all.

oops : chris barry = chris barrie.

"I didn't want to do 12"s anymore. I was sick of them. I just wasn't in the mood. I mean when you've got a track like 'Relax' or 'Two Tribes' it's great, but when you've got a track like 'The Power of Love' to do a 12" of it's bloody awful. It's boring! Nobody really wants a 12" of it."

is that a holly quote ?

Trevor, I assume.

I assume the band didn't actually "do" anything for their versions.

The Pleasuredome Fruitness Mix is on the Twelve Inches comp I think. Possibly slightly truncated, sacrilege no doubt.

Yes, it's 12 minutes -- so if it is truncated, that would be surprising and kind of pointless.

Just did a little research on Wikipedia on this. There are apparently two long single versions of WttPD: "Fruitness" and "Real Altered," which is about nine-and-a-half minutes. Both include pretty long spoken word intros derived of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. Assuming that the "An Alternative To Reality" mix on the ZTT box is the same (they are about two seconds different in length),

I much prefer "Fruitness," which opens with a long intro featuring an actor dead seriously reading about things like the "sound of the chiseled strokes of the Dionysian world artists" while gauzy synth arpeggios and beats flitter in the background. It's both ridiculous and awesome and gives way to the crispest, most expensive-sounding mix of Frankie's career, weaving together their wildest dance and progressive sensibilities and a healthy dose of drama that doesn't let up for about seven or eight minutes.

I love it.

Nothing should surprise when it comes to ZTT related reissues. It is also on the 2CD version of a compilation called Frankie Say Greatest and that seems to be the full fruit bowl.

The voice actor is of course Geoffrey Palmer, probably best known as the dour conservative dad in the Carla Lane sitcom Butterflies.

Last reissue was the Inside the Pleasuredome box which gives a good impression of being comprehensive while actually not being, of course.

Trying to remember what mix it is where there's a long voice-over describing the design and production of a 12 mix etc. Or is that a Propaganda 12" I'm thinking of?

I remember my brother enthusiastically buying this album, and seeing the videos for "Relax" and "Two Tribes" on local video shows. I don't recall ever listening to the non-single songs on the album, it's a total blank, and we were certainly the only household I knew of with a copy of the album, even though "Relax" seemed to enjoy some level of popularity... in the US they were more of a novelty act, one in a long stream of British synth acts that managed to dent the charts. Certainly living in SoCal at the time and having 91X/KROQ championing that kind of stuff abetted our exposure to it, but a lot of of it felt sort of context-less and strange, I think this was even before the period where we were aware that issues of NME/Melody Maker were available (probably exclusively from Rhino Records in Claremont). Their role as provocateurs did come across to some extent; the cold war stuff in Two Tribes being sledgehammer obvious, the coded gay references less so, although yeah the general consensus of our peers was that anything from England with synthesizers = gay. But accusations of various kinds of music being gay (Michael Jackson, Motley Crue, etc.) were so common back then, it was just like the most convenient garden-variety insult at hand on the playground or in class. I do remember this album being a bone of contention with our heavy metal enthusiast cousin... at the time I had no idea who Trevor Horn was, what "shagging" meant (I thought it was a soccer reference), or why they were such a huge deal in the UK.

Trying to remember what mix it is where there's a long voice-over describing the design and production of a 12 mix etc. Or is that a Propaganda 12" I'm thinking of?

That would be Rage Hard (+) aka The Young Person's Guide To The 12".

Thanks.

xpost- wonder what a poll of the non-singles would throw up.

Lipson and Morley responsible for that more than Horn I think. It's obviously highly novelty but also brilliant and just check how it blooms into the widescreen disco of the main song. Surprised they didn't call it the Tubular Bellend Mix though.

Ah yeah, it goes into introducing all the instruments doesn't it. LOL. "Godlike bass guitar"

the cold war stuff in Two Tribes being sledgehammer obvious, the coded gay references less so

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCpz3LAjxek

Yeah, but that version was never shown on MTV.

Yeah that never aired in the u.s.

barely here either come to that. 2 x late-night showings on The Tube iirc.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

hey The Power Of Love put up a fair fight.

About what I suspected, but I'm more surprised that Οὖτις was living in the Pomona Valley and shopping at Rhino Claremont around the same time I was.

I can't really listen to 'Welcome To The Pleasuredome' in any kind of edited form, it has to be the full-length version on the LP or nothing. The excess of it all is the whole point!

Also, I vastly prefer the original CD tracklisting of Welcome To The Pleasuredome to the vinyl edition, because it has the Annihilation mix of 'Two Tribes' and 'Happy Hi!' on it, and it gets rid of the awful cover of 'San Jose' too.

I can't really listen to 'Welcome To The Pleasuredome' in any kind of edited form, it /has/ to be the full-length version on the LP or nothing. The excess of it all is the whole point!

Pretty sure "Fruitness" is longer than the LP version. Treat yourself!

Trying to remember what mix it is where there's a long voice-over describing the design and production of a 12 mix etc. Or is that a Propaganda 12" I'm thinking of?

That would be Rage Hard (+) aka The Young Person's Guide To The 12".

Never heard this before...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Z50_TPDyo

Is that the Young Person's Guide? I should have advocated for it harder.

Listening to the early FGTH Peel Session stuff... amazing just how much was actually in place before Trevor Horn got his hands on the material, actually!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-AUwwSR-bg

"Welcome to the Pleasuredome (Fruitness Mix)"

for 70p i got the digital version and f*ck its good.

thank you for the nudge.

You're welcome!