Horn produced Frankie Goes to Hollywood to such an extent that by the time the completed version of the debut single ‘Relax’ was finished it contained no trace of any of the actual
group’s original instrument-playing (besides vocals, their only intrusion on to the completed mix came in the form a sampled recording of them jumping into a swimming pool). Admitting that
‘there was no actual playing by the band’, Horn nevertheless sought to
qualify the producer’s decisive input by observing, ‘but the whole
feeling
came from the band’.
2
Released in October 1983, ‘Relax’ took three months before it became a hit, despite airtime
on the BBC. Just as it had crawled into the top ten, the Radio 1 DJ Mike Read spotted that the lyrics were sexually suggestive and promptly ejected the record while it was playing live on his
morning show. The surprise was more that it had failed to stir anyone at Broadcasting House earlier (the band had even appeared on
Top of the Pops
the previous week). But once the alarm was
raised, Read’s Reithian efforts to protect his listeners from what appears to be advice about avoiding premature ejaculation received almost immediate endorsement with a BBC-wide prohibition.
The perhaps inevitable consequence was to turn the single into a cause célèbre and a massive hit: it stayed at number one for five weeks in January and February 1984, during which
time
Top of the Pops
was embarrassingly unable to play the top of the pops.
Having worked with Malcolm McLaren on the latter’s innovative
Duck Rock
album, Trevor Horn had come to appreciate his talent for engineering the sort of publicity that had propelled
the Sex Pistols to the front pages of the tabloid press as prize exhibits in the debate over the state of the nation. At ZTT, the role of turning five Liverpudlian wannabes into an
exhilarating/dispiriting expression of the zeitgeist fell to Paul Morley, who had already made his name as a
New Musical Express
journalist. Morley oversaw the ‘Relax’ record
cover (the images of sperm and nipple-twisting rather confirming Mike Read’s categorizing of the work as ‘overtly obscene’). Morley’s real moment of inspiration, though,
came when he took Katharine Hamnett’s idea of sloganized T-shirts and designed a white T-shirt with the slogan in bold black lettering ‘FRANKIE SAY RELAX’. During the summer of
1984, Frankie T-shirts were being paraded up and down the nation’s town and city centres, spouting forth on all manner of topical issues, including ‘FRANKIE SAY WORLD NUCLEAR BAN
NOW’ and ‘FRANKIE SAY ARM THE UNEMPLOYED’.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s first three singles, ‘Relax’, ‘Two Tribes’ and ‘The Power of Love’ all went to number one, making them the first band to
have achieved that feat since Gerry and the Pacemakers twenty-one years previously. This was quite something for a five-man group, two of whose members (Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford) were
unabashedly gay just at the moment when Aids was creating the panic of the age. Devoid of coyness, the ‘Relax’ video featured Johnson being carried on a rickshaw into a fetish club
where he proceeded to toy with a tiger and ride another man. It, too, fell foul of the BBC. Nevertheless, as a purely gay sado-masochist ensemble, Frankie Goes to Hollywood might have enjoyed no
more than novelty status. Instead, Morley’s promotional skills and the video for ‘Two Tribes’, in which Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko lookalikes
slugged it out in a boxing ring,
EN24
ensured that the band addressed two urgent popular apprehensions of pending annihilation in their
first couple of releases.
The result was Britain’s seventh and twenty-second highest-selling hit singles of all time. Perhaps this sort of glory was always destined to be fleeting – there is a limit to how
many contemporary issues one group can address without standing accused of exploiting grave events in pursuit of chart position. Indeed, as contemporaries of Nena (whose anti-nuclear arms warning,
‘99 Red Balloons’, supplanted ‘Relax’ at the top of the charts) and Live Aid, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were as much joining the protest bandwagon as driving it. But for a
brief mid-decade moment, pop reclaimed its role as a revolutionary youth movement for social and political change. During 1985, with continuing sales of their album
Welcome to the Pleasure
Dome
suggesting no diminution in their popular appeal, the group turned down Morley’s efforts to market them as The Beatles of the eighties with a feature film aimed at their further
promotion – even though Martin Amis was being lined up as scriptwriter and Nicholas Roeg as director. Feeding on their association with impending doom, the film would have cast them as
survivors in a post-apocalyptic world.
3
Instead, the group wanted to be masters of their own fate. Content to let Trevor Horn guide their ascent,
reaching the summit had dimmed their enthusiasm for continuing to submit to his mentoring, rather as the Sex Pistols had similarly tired of Malcolm McLaren’s manipulative style of management.
A determination to play live and perform their own music began a process of loss of direction and splits which was speedily followed by a disappointing second album in 1986 and, for Holly Johnson,
the onset of an all-consuming legal tussle to be freed from ZTT’s stingy contractual obligations. The legal battle was eventually won, but not before the creative momentum had been
squandered. Ultimately, without Horn’s elaborate and expensive production techniques, Frankie was going nowhere.
Ridicule Is Nothing to Be Scared of
If the pop music of the first half of the eighties had recycled historical categorizations, then ‘Relax’ would have been an exemplar of modern baroque. This lavish
and exhibitionist, bombastic yet effeminate, style had become mainstream by 1983 and naturally suited uncompromisingly exuberant ‘out and proud’ gay performers like Holly Johnson and
Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, as well as the far less sexually assertive cross-dresser Boy George, who three times topped the charts. While the lead singer of Culture Club dressed like
a girl, the suit-wearing Annie Lennox, with her dyed, short hair, emerged as Britain’s first successful androgynous female pop star. Indeed, gender-bending was a common look for
this electro-pop baroque and could hardly have been better exemplified than by Phil Oakey’s haircut, one half of which appeared to belong to a man and the other half to a woman. This seemed
an appropriate fashion to accompany a form of music-making that did not involve muscular guitar strumming and drum banging; so widespread became the poser-in-make-up look that it did not even
necessarily connote homosexuality. After all, it had sprung not just from the seventies glam-rock school of Marc Bolan and David Bowie but also from the decidedly un-camp borstal of punk.
Styling himself Adam Ant, Stuart Goddard was a former art-college punk who had come under the tutelage of Malcolm McLaren. It proved a short-lived association (McLaren lured away Adam’s
fellow Ants to join the fourteen-year-old Annabella Lwin in Bow Wow Wow, a Burundi-beat band which he hoped would ensure his next lucrative outrage), but it still lasted long enough for McLaren to
help shape the romantic-hero appearance that subsequently propelled Adam Ant to prominence. The punk warpaint and earrings were kept, but in place of ripped jeans and safety pins the singer was
dressed as if his horse had bolted during the Charge of the Light Brigade. Successive hits came made-to-measure with even more absurd historical costumes: among them a highwayman for ‘Stand
and Deliver’ and a Regency dandy for ‘Prince Charming’. The ‘Prince Charming’ video featured the pop star strutting around a ballroom and intoning ‘ridicule is
nothing to be scared of’, while striking a succession of ludicrously mannered poses, accompanied by Diana Dors as a fairy godmother. Catchy though Adam and the Ants’ music may have
been, it was hard not to conclude that the tone was established more by the accompanying visual spectacle than by purely aural considerations.
Yet Adam Ant was far from being alone in blending the aesthetics of punk with those of David Bowie to imbue pop with a theatrical, almost pantomime, essence. The pioneers of this movement were
dubbed the New Romantics, taking punk’s spirit of exhibitionism, self-expression and rejection of conformist attitudes and dress sense, while emphatically ditching its accompanying promotion
of aggressive, antisocial and crude behaviour. The movement had begun in a small Covent Garden club which opened in 1979, called Blitz. Its doorman was Steve Strange, who determined whose look was
sufficiently to his liking to be worthy of entry. Strange’s preference was generally for the outlandishly dressed, and the ‘Blitz Kids’ were often either students at the nearby St
Martin’s College of Art or shop assistants and clerical workers escaping the tedium of routine by dressing up at night like punks who had somehow either been invited to a 1920s party thrown
by the
Bright Young Things or wandered into the Weimar cabaret of a Christopher Isherwood novel. Boys hopeful of gaining entry donned Ruritanian uniforms and other camp
fopperies, girls arrived as if ready to strike a pose for Tamara de Lempicka. Exemplifying the gender-bending trend, both sexes slapped on unsubtle quantities of make-up, the definitive look
involving geisha-white foundation to create a facial blank canvas on to which dramatic expressions – a raised eyebrow, a frown – or a beauty spot or a circle of rouge could be painted.
The chosen few who made it inside found a not-yet-famous George O’Dowd (Boy George) working as a cloakroom attendant dressed either in ecclesiastical drag or as a geisha. The dance floor
resonated to the synth-pop sounds favoured by the resident DJ, Rusty Egan, a former drummer with punk bands whose friendship with Strange had started when he lent him his sofa only to find the
dosser bringing his extensive travelling wardrobe with him. As Egan later reminisced: ‘The song that became the anthem of the club was “Heroes” by Bowie. “Just for one
day” you could dress up and be more than what Britain had to offer you.’
4
Egan and Strange formed their own band, Visage, which in November 1980 scored a hit that helped establish the classic New Romantic sound nationwide. Co-written with Midge Ure and Billy Currie
(who would both soon find fame in Ultravox), ‘Fade to Grey’ was electro-pop at its purest, its art-house pretentiousness assisted by seductive-sounding backing vocals in French. No less
(and perhaps more) important, the accompanying video made the powdered face, eyeliner and spiky hairsprayed coiffure of the New Romantic style familiar beyond the confines of the Blitz Club, to
Top of the Pops
viewers across the length and breadth of the country. For the visual splendour and art-pop glamour of the New Romantic groups perfectly suited promotion through music videos,
a medium that was only beginning to establish itself and which New Romanticism was now to play such a part in developing. The time was right not least because there was an abundance of creative
talent available which, unable to find work in the declining film industry, either had to make exceptionally artistic television adverts or else work on advertisements’ natural spin-offs
– pop videos.
The distinctive style of the early eighties’ British pop video was fundamentally shaped by two directors, David Mallet and the Australian-born, London-domiciled, Russell Mulcahy.
Mallet’s credits included the extraordinary, discordantly coloured dreamscape accompanying David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1980) in which something close to the visual
language of Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal
was reproduced: Bowie, dressed as a clown, is followed by a dark-caped retinue – one of them Steve Strange – pushed onwards by
a big digger towards a beach with a black sky. The memorable result represented a considerable artistic achievement given that the necessary post-production technology was in its infancy. It
certainly set
the bar for pretentiousness – equalled by Mulcachy, who directed The Buggles’ futuristic ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ (1979), a
film-noir setting for the members of Ultravox to tread the moonlit cobbles of Covent Garden (incongruously) singing ‘Vienna’ (1981), a boater-clad Elton John prancing around the French
Riviera to ‘I’m Still Standing’ (1983), Duran Duran sailing a luxury yacht in ‘Rio’ (1982) or spinning round on windmills and dodging flying savages in ‘Wild
Boys’ (1984) – the last requiring a set so elaborate that it took up a large part of Pinewood Studios and a $1 million budget. With lesser talents seeking to mimic these videotape
masterpieces, the overblown results were ably parodied in the 1982
Not the Nine O’Clock News
sketch ‘Nice Video, Shame about the Song’ – a pop video for the imaginary
band Lufthansa Terminal, featuring a lake on fire, a stately home, sword-wielding cavaliers, leggy female Nazis and Mallet-esque colour manipulation. In truth, the spoof was no more ridiculous than
the video Mulcachy directed that year for Bonnie Tyler’s number-one hit ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, in which the back-lit, husky-throated, blonde singer walked dreamily through
the dorms of a public school (actually a defunct Victorian Gothic lunatic asylum), while the boys raised black-tie toasts to each other, donned boating jackets, sang in choral surplices, took
communal showers and, less explicably, flung themselves about while dancing in karate kit. This was not rock and roll as anyone serious had previously portrayed it.
Instead, the expensive production values that these videos brought to pop turned a medium that had once been a means of working-class expression into a form of dramatic spectacle that aspired to
high opera and was certainly as expensive to choreograph. According to taste, this was a betrayal of pop’s proletarian roots – to say nothing of punk’s cheap
‘do-it-yourself’ ethos – or a triumphal manifestation of how consumerism and aspiration could make aristocrats of anyone (so long as they had a major record label behind them).
Now it was pop stars who performed in dinner jackets (their black bow ties fixed around wing-collars – soft collars being momentarily deemed
too
ordinary) and swung on chandeliers as
if they were Oxford undergraduates applying for membership of the Bullingdon Club. Bryan Ferry performed attired as if he was out for a balmy evening stroll along the Promenade des Anglais –
a long way from his working-class childhood in Tyne and Wear. Removed from their industrial Sheffield roots, the band ABC did a promo shoot for ‘All of My Heart’ dressed as country
squires and performed the video for ‘The Look of Love’ in the sort of striped blazers and straw boaters that might have made it into the stewards’ enclosure at the Henley Royal
Regatta. The video for the atmospheric, nostalgic ‘Souvenir’ by the electro-pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) involved tracking shots of the band’s two front men,
Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey, driving a classic convertible sports car around the park at Blenheim Palace,
interspersed with footage of Humphreys looking dreamily
thoughtful by the Palladian temples of Stowe public school. It was as if these two lads from the Wirral were aping Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, just at the moment when
Granada Television’s screen adaptation of
Brideshead Revisited
had brought the privileged friends back into the public consciousness. Whether the conversion of bands from gritty and
depressed parts of the country into glamorous toffs was subversive to Britain’s class structure or subservient to it depended upon the critic’s sense of irony.