Welcome back to This Month in Liverpool Music History. So far this month we’ve taken a look at beginnings; OMD’s groundbreaking debut record, and the twelve-hour recording frenzy that birthed the Beatles’ ‘Please, Please Me’. This week, we’re taking a look at an ending, the release of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s final single, ‘Watching the Wildlife’.
Released on the 23rd of February, 1987, the single followed a continuing trend of diminishing returns for the band that, just three years prior, had shook the world and dominated the charts. Taken from the band’s second album, ‘Liverpool’ released October in the year prior, it peaked at number 28 on the singles charts. A success to some, but the lowest a Frankie track had until this point performed. What happened?
The group first started taking shape in 1980, but most of the lineup that would make it to stardom wouldn’t be refined until 1982. Founded by frontman Holly Johnson, he would amass a group known colloquially as ‘The Lads’ including drummer Peter Gill, Mark O’Toole on bass, Brian ‘Nasher’ Nash on guitar, and Paul Rutherford on backing vocals. A NME article covering a festival in Sefton Park in the September of that year, showed that excitement was already surrounding Frankie in this infant stage; ‘Franke Goes To Hollywood, who are THE name to drop right now and what a name. With their showbizzy act, all steamy leather-clad sex and tongue-in-cheek sleaze, goes a truly funky sound — these weirdos will be big.’ Jump forward to February 1983, and they secure a performance on Channel 4’s ‘The Tube’ where ’viewers caught a shocking glimpse of Frankie in fetish wear, joined by a pair of writhing PVC-clad females known as the Leatherpettes.’ One viewer of this broadcast was Chris Squire, the bassist for the prog band Yes, who were in the process of recording their album ‘90125’ with producer Trevor Horn. Squire suggested the band should be signed to Horn’s newly established record label, ZTT. Rutherford would later reflect; ‘He [Horn] thought the gay thing was the most dangerous thing about us, but he loved that, and the fact that we were overtly sexual.’
By October, their debut single ‘Relax’ had hit shelves to little fanfare, seeing slow sales. That was until January, 1984, when Frankie would appear on Top of The Pops with the track. What followed was unprecedented. Paul Lester, writing for the Guardian thirty years later states; ‘No band has dominated a twelve-month period like Frankie ruled 1984.’ The Top of the Pops performance brought ‘Relax’ into the limelight, where the BBC quickly tried to suppress it, banning it from their radio stations for its sexual obscenity, a case not helped by the S&M bar set music video where PVC-clad patrons get sprayed by absurd quantities of an… ambiguous… white liquid. To nobody’s surprise this ban amounted to putting out fire with gasoline, and Frankie’s new ‘cool, edgy and rebellious’ reputation would be the main driving factor in their success, besides the simply exceptional music.
‘Relax’ rocketed to the number one spot in the singles charts, where it held firm for five consecutive weeks. By August of that year, their second single, ‘Two Tribes’ would stay at number one for nine weeks, with ‘Relax’ rising back up to number two, making Frankie the first band to hold the top two positions at a single time since The Beatles in 1968. Their first album, ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ released in November, saw advance sales of a million copies, and the iconic ‘Frankie Says’ t-shirts were selling in the hundreds of thousands, carrying slogans such as ‘Frankie Says Arm the Unemployed’ and ‘Bomb is Just a Four Letter Word’. The dangerous sexuality of their music resonated with the British youth as an act of rebellion under the autocracy of Thatcher and the general grip of social conservatism peddled by the media at the time. Rutherford would attribute much of their appeal to their ‘fuck-it Liverpool attitude’. Nash adds; ‘We were discovering our sexuality the same time the world was. We were at the forefront of that, making sense of gay rights.’ On the title track of their debut album, Holly would sing ‘shooting stars never stop, even when they reach the top’ but in just a couple of years, it would all end in a fury of lawsuits and backstage fist-fights.
A key factor in the simmering, behind the scenes resentment, besides clashing egos, was in the stipulations of the contract they signed with ZTT. The deal entailed a pitiful royalties percentage for the band, the label having final say in the choice of recording studio, producer and budget, and, significantly, any member who wished to leave would still be trapped in this deal. The scales were undoubtedly tipped in ZTTs favour, and Johnson wanted out. During their last tour, Johnson had brought in his boyfriend, Wolfgang Kuhle, as a personal manager. Trevor Horn’s wife, Jill Sinclair, attributed to Kuhle the same effect on the band as has been put on Yoko Ono with The Beatles. When the press caught wind, they had a field day, cooking up headlines like HOLLY’S SIX FOOT HUNK SPLITS FRANKIES. Wallasey musician and artistic director Jayne Casey, who had played alongside Johnson in his first band, Big in Japan, had this to say; ‘People assume that it was Wolfgang who was making Holly [Johnson] grow up, but Holly was growing up before. There is a lot of bad feeling about Wolfgang because he’s another man. There are a lot of homophobes around in the press and in record companies. They assume that one person is the dominant partner and the other is the passive partner, which is not necessarily so. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about it.’ The business side of Frankie was getting out of hand, and Kuhle was helping Johnson realise the pitfalls of the contract they were in.
When their second album released, it was received poorly by critics and listeners. One review for Watching the Wildlife from the Record Mirror gave a particularly humorous review; ‘The fact that you’re supposed to get a CONDOM with the cassette version of this could lead to irksome speculation about the title. So let’s just say that giving away prophylactics is a GOOD IDEA, and if this piece of swinging, brassy, orchestral bombast wasn’t all swollen up like an inflated Durex, it might have been too.’ The costs of the sessions for the Liverpool album had reached up to £800,000, twice as much as the recording of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, for half the number of tracks. The contract with the label meant that this would be charged to the band, and paid to the studios that ZTT chose, often their own; the label were profiting from their own reckless spending and making the artists pay. On July 23rd 1987, Johnson would announce his intent to leave ZTT and sign as a solo artist with MCA, ZTT countered with an injunction to prevent this on the ground that this constituted a breach of their original contract. With the help of Tony Russell, a lawyer who helped George Michael and Andrew Ridgley (Wham!) in a similar case back in 1983, Johnson took ZTT to court. The battle would stretch on until March 1988. ZTT’s case hinged on the argument that Frankie’s success was mostly down to their production techniques and marketing skills, showcasing the expensive electronic manipulation they had done to Johnson’s voice. On this Johnson reflected; ‘I think that between them, ZTT and their barristers cooked up quite a convincing case. They even showed pictures of Frankie Goes To Hollywood in bondage gear before being signed and then in nice smart suits after being signed. It was absolutely ridiculous. In the end it was stupid because they were saying, ‘Holly Johnson is a disgusting obscene person who can’t sing, and yes, we want to keep him.’
The judge ruled in Johnson’s favour, and he was free to pursue a solo career with MCA, in 1989 he would release his debut ‘Blast’, featuring two top five singles, the album itself taking number one and staying in the top fifty for fourteen weeks. Attempts to continue or reunite the band would prove futile for thirty-six years until the 7th May, 2023, where the band put aside their differences for a one off, single song performance at The National Lottery's Big Eurovision Welcome outside St. George’s Hall, securing their place in Liverpool’s music history. Arguably the UK’s first pop phenomenon since The Beatles, the intensity of their success has never quite been matched. It’s clear to see that there’s a unique and enrapturing charm to the scouse irreverence that made groups like The Beatles and Frankie Goes to Hollywood so powerful. Former NME writer, Paul Morley, who collaborated with the band in the writing of the ‘Frankie Says’ t-shirt slogans and album liner notes had this to say on their legacy; ‘I see those sorts of reverberations every day. After Frankie there was a lot of commercial music being packaged beautifully, and videos with artistic impulses. They were part of a change in pop in terms of sophistication that continues to this day.’ The way they confronted the British public with a transgressive, queer sexuality that the media tried to suppress, was a major watershed moment in how openly LGBTQ+ perspectives could be expressed in the mainstream, not with the sensitive internality of contemporaries like Bronski Beat and Erasure, but with an audacious middle finger to heteronormative values, paired wonderfully with that Liverpudlian disregard for authority.
So, even on this messy, sour note of an ending, the accomplishments of this Liverpool band are worth reflecting on. It’s clear to see that our city produces a distinct type of character, one that is frequently reflected in our best performing cultural exports; fierce individuality. Cater to no one, keep doing you. And, should you ever get that record deal, read the fine print.
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