Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Frankie Say Greatest

ZTT Records, Out Now.

It is a disco at the dawn of the eighties. Pop, bombast and synths are swamping stereos and “Blue Monday” has already happened. GRID has been reclassified as AIDS – it’s ravages being made clear worldwide – while war, holding actions and terrorism is part of the worldwide language of engagement. Holly Johnson is wondering if we’re living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods? Posters on ever street corner tell you that “Frankie Say Relax.” People ask “How?”

I’m too young for all of this of course, but the background noise of tension, conflict, fear and paranoia scream from Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s early forays into the pop chart. For two summers, Frankie used pop-music to strategically assault middle England, corrupting their children, exposing their fantasies and making them dance. With “Relax”, “Two Tribes” and “The Power of Love” they formed a trinity of number ones that remain powerful, even though we’re twenty five years older. Frankie Say Greatest doesn’t stop there though, and that’s a shame.

For a debut single, “Relax” is incredible. Everything about it sounds bound, gagged and restrained: the drums seem clipped and held back by a regular ticking that notches up to a roar in less than four minutes. Johnson’s voice spits and sears on the surface, barely tied down to the bed of the backing track. He is so clearly singing about sex – about the pleasure of f*cking – that euphemisms just aren’t worth it, and just as the song climaxes he sags, his groaning echo of “come” bouncing around the speaker.

Brilliant. Frankie needn’t have done anything else to be rendered immortal, but they did: in ‘Two Tribes’ they set Reagan and Chernenko against one another in a wrestling ring, with a soundtrack that races towards destruction. Backing singers affirm Johnson’s cries, like bomber pilots confirming the impact of an intercontinental pop-missile. “Let’s go to war, let’s go to war!”. Follow up single ‘The Power of Love’ doesn’t once let you feel like it might be okay. Having wallowed in destruction and lust, this ballad becomes a crisp, chilling acknowledgement that it might not be okay. Love becomes nuclear fire, a “force from above” that cleans one out with a fiery rush. In Frankie’s landscape of the end days, love becomes the only thing worth holding onto, as we rip the world apart.

When ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ didn’t get to number one, it perhaps unfairly signalled the start of Frankie’s demise. It isn’t all that bad, but the non-specific lust and idolatry doesn’t strike at the heart in the way that ‘Relax’ did. After a short break to write and record, Frankie returned with Liverpool, and it all goes wrong. The tracks from Frankie’s second and last album whimper through the speakers, struggling under the weight of Horn’s production. With such Teflon-coated pop it becomes impossible to tell if there are any ideas left: ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’, ‘Rage Hard’ and ‘Watching the Wildlife’ seem flaccid, as though the lithe bodies reclining in the Pleasuredome have gone soft, dressing in butch clothing and fooling no-one.

Like New Order, Frankie were arguably in a position where the people who produced and released their work felt they had more ownership of it than the band themselves. Independent labels began co-opting major label positions, because in the maze of contracts and gentleman’s agreements it was too much effort for an artist to extricate oneself from the tangle. That was especially true as pop super-producers exerted greater influence on sales and releases. By the dusk of the eighties, Johnson is fighting to leave Frankie behind, and Stock, Aitken, Waterman own the UK Top 10.

I felt the echo of all this: In the nineties, Frankie never quite went away – at least at school discos. A troubled ZTT persistently resurrected those former number ones with remix after remix, clawing money from a relationship long soured, strip-mining ideas from the sleeves, press releases and lyrics, cellophane-wrapping them as anthems. The music survives this, and sometimes thrives on it, but with little of the substance. In ten years, Frankie get two well-publicised greatest hits packages and most of the band, besides Johnson, begin a lifetime of reformation tours. …Greatest acknowledges this by including ten remixes in the two disc running order, but they seem sad when removed from the Ibiza sound that spawned them. The originals are urgent beasts, the remixes just pets.

It is now the close of the noughties; white flyposters have appeared all summer splashing Frankie Say Relax back into the vocabulary and winter is setting in. Repressive legislation, rising crime rates and a recession has set middle England frothing at even the slightest hint of decadence, while sex and horror are well-established gods. Somewhere in this Holly Johnson, now a respected artist, is stood in a DJ booth gamely pressing play on another re-release. He is clearly aware things are as bad as they were back then if not worse. Pop music is screaming to be used well again, but it doesn’t sound like it will be. In the beginning, Frankie Say Greatest has a power and kick I haven’t felt in ages, but as reality sets in the decline is just too depressing to bear out.