It seemed as though this album was doomed from the start. By the time the album was released, people were tired of all of those damned T-shirts and critics and music journalists began a backlash to the band. Now, this album had expanded to a double album, which is very rare for a debut album. Now, I owned two singles from this mysterious new band from England that had yet to release an album.Īs 1984 was ending, finally, Frankie Goes To Hollywood released their debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome. Of course, that song ripped up the dance floor as well. That song took the energy of “Relax” and replaced it’s sexually based lyrics with those about the cold war tensions being felt at the time between the US and the old USSR. I actually had a hot, new single that was relatively unknown on campus.Ī few months later, my record store connection hooked me up with the 12-inch single of Frankie’s second single “Two Tribes”. It may have been the song of the night according to the crowd’s reaction, even beating out reactions to Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Gap Band, “Atomic Dog” & the rap trilogy of “Planet Rock”, “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Message”. I then debuted the song while DJ-ing a party that very weekend to an extremely enthusiastic crowd. In my mind, “Relax” was the sound of something new and exciting, so I bought the single. I was told this band was HUGE in the UK, based solely on the hype machine behind this single and the aforementioned T-shirts. As the employee and I discussed the single, he informed me that the band was the studio concoction of former Buggles/Yes lead singer-turned Art of Noise/Yes’s 90210 producer Trevor Horn. To be honest, the energy of the use of 80s musical trappings of synthesizers, computers and drum machines blew me away. He put this single on his turntable and turned the knob to “11” ( Spinal Tap was still a few months from being big on campus). At the time, I was doing my record store excavations for the newest dance songs for my party mixes, when a guy at the used record store in the “Village” near the Ball State campus introduced me to Frankie. Then the flood gates burst open with all kinds of T-shirts based on those initial Frankie tees.įrankie Goes To Hollywood came to my attention in the winter of 1983 through their brilliant debut single “Relax”. breakthrough hit “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” when the people in the background were wearing those “Choose Life” T-shirts. Those Frankie T-shirts were parodied in Wham!’s video for their U.S. That T-shirt and the ones that read “Frankie Say War Hide Yourself” were brilliant pieces of the hype machine behind an up-and-coming band from Liverpool called Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Remember those great 80s T-shirts that read, “Frankie Say RELAX”? Honestly, I never owned one, though I must admit I spent the summer of 1984 scouring the stores of Muncie and Indianapolis searching for such a T-shirt.
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