A little light relief on the Music to Fight Evil playlist this week - a huge UK Number One pop hit from 1984. It's difficult now to understand the furore caused by Frankie Goes to Hollywood's explosion onto the pop scene. Their debut single, Relax, in 1983, was effectively banned by the BBC for its sexual content, ensuring that it was the most talked-about record of the era, spending five weeks at the top of the UK charts and becoming one of the bestselling British singles of all time.
And they followed it up by spending another nine weeks at Number One with Two Tribes. Is this an anti-war song? A protest song? Possibly not. When lead vocalist Holly Johnson sings "Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new Gods?" it is with a lascivious relish that suggests he's enjoying the ride. Frankie Goes to Hollywood may not have had a clear agenda, but when they followed up a hit song about sex with a hit song about war they were scrubbing away lines in the sand that the establishment would never really redrawn.
Some credit for their success has to go to the music business visionaries who saw their potential. The record label ZTT was formed by ex-Buggles popstar-turned-producer Trevor Horn with his wife, Jill Sinclair, and pretentious NME journalist Paul Morley. Morley was a relentless self-publicist and cultural commentator who characterised himself as a director of popular taste rather than merely an observer of it, a kind of Eighties Malcolm McLaren, discovering a band of scruffy Liverpudlian no-hopers and turning them into a scandalous sensation for the salivating masses, like the Sex Pistols before them.
ZTT didn't really deserve credit for discovering FGTH. The band had recorded a session for John Peel on Radio 1 back in the Christmas of 1982 and the buzz around the band was already intensifying long before ZTT signed them. But if you track down the Peel Session recording of Two Tribes, it's evident that Trevor Horn subsequently added a puffed-up, supremely Eighties grandiosity that transformed a campy Hi-NRG guitar band into a musical force to frighten your parents and titillate the tabloids.
When accused of over-hyping the band in a TV interview when Two Tribes was released, Morley said that Frankie needed to be packaged for the public "because they're a bunch of moronic tit-heads, really, so you have to build a certain kind of framework around them," but Holly Johnson immediately jumped in to challenge him, saying "They try and appear as though they manipulate us, this record company... but they are our puppets, definitely".
Whatever the dynamic between them, Paul Morley certainly figured more overtly in the band's public profile than is usual for a record company executive or impresario. Indeed, the B side of Two Tribes was a track called One February Friday which is nothing less than a typically haughty interview with the band conducted by Morley and set to a slow, noodling instrumental track vaguely redolent of the A side.
In the video promo for Two Tribes, the leaders of the US and USSR are seen scrapping in a bare-knuckle boxing ring, surrounded by other world leaders laying bets and baying for blood, with Holly Johnson acting as television Barnum & Bailey ringmaster, fanning the flames of doom as if global conflict was nothing more than a game show format.
In a way, it's hard not to see Two Tribes as a cynical manipulation of the prevailing mid-Eighties fear of nuclear war, but despite being very much of its time, it stands up as a great pop song with multiple hooks and a truly atomic synth bass riff.
You can learn more about Frankie Goes To Hollywood here
About the curator: Jon Ewing
After graduating from the University of Keele in England with a degree in Politics and American Studies, Jon worked as editor of a music and entertainment magazine before spending several years as a freelance writer and, with the advent of the internet, a website designer, developer and consultant. He lives in Reading, home to one of the world's most famous and long-running music festivals, which he has attended every year since 1992.
A high-speed combination of punk chorus and ska verse, Mustard Plug's singalong Unite and Fight is just one of a sensational 28 tracks on the Ska Against Racism album compiled by Bad Time Records in 2020 to raise funds for non-profit organisations working to improve education, opportunity and justice for black people in the USA and beyond. With a barrelling momentum and a repudiation of violent action, this uplifting song is a call to arms for those of us committed to disarmament.