Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome To The Pleasuredome Deluxe Edition (UMR)
★★★★★
Of course Trevor Horn is a genius. But part of Horn’s talent is in seeing ideas through to their maximum potential. And this gigantic boxset of possibly the ultimate 80s album reveals how the initial idea of Frankie Goes To Hollywood was absolutely not Trevor Horn’s.
The key disc in Welcome To The Pleasuredome Deluxe Edition’s 7CD+Blu-Ray set (Steven Wilson’s new mix of the album is also on 2LP) is the early years CD1, because ZTT latched on to Relax, Two Tribes and The Power Of Love when they were already sounding fantastic.
Holly Johnson sings like a dream: powerful, commanding but also lean and hungry. It’s a very rare combination.
It’s as important, given the endless claims of how they didn’t play on the album itself, that Mark O’Toole and Ped Gill were a mighty rhythm section, too. Before the precocious Brian Nash joined, O’Toole’s rolling bass is a lead instrument, and he unwittingly invents Blur’s Alex James during his muscular playing in the first 1982 demo of Relax.
All that Frankie maybe lacked, and presumably is why labels were too blind to start a bidding war, was an obvious direction: Love Has Got A Gun (eventually becoming Wish) is pure funk, Krisco Kisses is frantic post-punk, Two Tribes is all speedy urgency, Welcome To The Pleasuredome louche disco, Relax on John Peel all these things and more.
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