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It all happened in Liverpool, end of the seventies, beginning of the eighties. A whole series of bands were formed, broke up, and regrouped with people such as Pete Wylie, Julian Cope, Ian McCullogh (the Crucial Three; later on Wah!; Echo and the Bunnymen), Bill Drummond (JAMS/Timelords/KLF), Pete Burns (Dead Or Alive), Ian Broodie (the Lightning Seeds), and some weird kid called Holly Johnson. Drummond, Broodie, and Johnson were at a time all in a band called Big In Japan (other members were Jayne Casey and Kevin Ward) who enjoyed quite some success as an underground trendsetting New Wave band. After the breakup of Big in Japan, Holly Johnson had some solo successes, releasing two singles, in 1979 (Yankee Rose, which he played on Granada TV) and 1980 (Hobo Joe). Wanting to find a new band, Holly teamed up with several different people, at one point forming a band called `Frankie Goes To Hollywood' after a magazine cover on Frank Sinatra saying `Frankie Goes Hollywood' which hung in a rehearsal room. This band never played a gig and actually didn't consist of any of the other future members of the FGTH.
For those with a finer eye for details, check out this page for a detailed table containing info on all bands between 1977 and 1982 that involved any of the Frankies.
Somewhere around the beginning of 1982, Holly formed a band together with two people he had met and seen playing in other bands: Peter Gill (Ped) on drums and Mark O'Toole on bass, and redubbed the band `Frankie Goes To Hollywood'. Gerard (Ged) O'Toole (Mark's brother) played guitar during the first gigs of the new Frankie Goes To Hollywood. These gigs also featured a number of barely clothed girls, dubbed the Leather Pets, who can still be seen on some of the photo material of the early record releases. Relax and Two Tribes were written in this period. Paul Rutherford, an old friend of Holly from the Liverpool gay scene, joined the band after having seen (and joined) the band perform on stage. FGTH recorded a John Peel session in September 1982, and the band also made it to television with a performance shootage done for the UK tv programme The Tube. Holly and Paul, dressed in black leather, sing and crawl on top of each other. Mark wears a Zorro-mask. The act was very dirty and by all means very rock'n'roll. When Ged O'Toole got too busy with other affairs, he was replaced on guitar by Brian Nash (Nasher) who had played in a band (The Dancing Girls) with Ped earlier on.
October 31, 1983 saw the start of Zang Tuum Tumb, a record label headed by producer Trevor Horn, manager Jill Sinclair (Horn's wife) and (ex-)pop journalist and self-acclaimed marketing genius Paul Morley. Horn had been in the Buggles with Geoff Downs for some years, had been singer/producer with Yes for a year, and had since concentrated on producing. ZTT staged a hyped introduction of three acts, one being the faceless and enigmatic Art of Noise, the second one being Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and the third one being Propaganda. After having seen the leather act, ZTT decided FGTH was the perfect band to raise the eyebrows with, and FGTH were quickly signed.
In the newly refurbished Sarm West studios, Trevor Horn started to rework some of the raw FGTH songs in July 1983, and produced completely studio-modeled versions of Relax and Two Tribes. The sound of the songs had become smoother, and at the same time more explosive, bombastic, and more disco. Relax was released as a single on October 24, 1983, and was the number 1 in the UK charts for five weeks. The single was accompanied by a video `FGTH style', displaying a decadent leather bar in many of its luscious details. The video was banned by many conservative tv stations and was later on replaced by a simple video with FGTH performing and singing to the camera surrounded by green laser light. Even the cover of the single was found to be `not decent' (BBC Radio One DJ Mike Read refused to play it in his show as he thought the record was `overtly obscene' - January 11, 1984). All contributed to a fast growing popularity of the band in the course of 1984 throughout the UK and Europe and the US, a period which was elegantly dubbed by ZTT as `the BANG!'.
Second single to be released was Two Tribes (May 28, 1984) which was accompanied by a brilliant video clip directed by famous duo Godley and Creme. The video depicts Reagan and Tchernenko fighting a bloody no-rule match in a small arena while being watched (and later on joined) by the rest of the world. FGTH are the camera crew who film the happening; Holly provides the commentary. Two Tribes (with the powerful B-side and Edwin Starr cover War) also hit the UK number 1 position and stayed there for 9 weeks.
On October 29, 1984, the double-album Welcome To The Pleasuredome was released (the CD, containing a slightly altered list of songs, was released on August 25, 1985). The album contained a mix of Trevor Horn / Stephen Lipson `studio adventures' and some more raw FGTH material. The FGTH team of contributors contained, among many others, members of the Art of Noise Jonathan Jeczalic and Anne Dudley, and keyboard player Andrew Richards. Anne Dudley worked on the string arrangement of The Power of Love, which was released as a Christmas single in December 1984, accompanied by a sweet Christmas video with the members of FGTH merely and literally acting as border fillings. As usual, the single hit the UK number one position, only for one week this time.
The title song of the album, Welcome To The Pleasuredome, was released as a single on March 18, 1985. The video showed FGTH enjoying themselves in their Pleasuredome, amounting to things with snakes, naked women and bathtubs (among other features). It got stuck at number 2 in the UK charts.
Remixes that were previously released on vinyl were put on a Japanese compilation CD, BANG! in 1985. It marked a temporary end of an immense series of remixes extracted from the material on Welcome To The Pleasuredome (a release style that was ridiculed in BBC's Spitting Image show with a Holly Johnson puppet singing `Remix, reuse it...').
The recording of Liverpool, Frankies second album, saw another recording studio than good old Sarm West at the good old Blue Building, viz. the Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum, The Netherlands, as well as another producer at the mixing table (Stephen Lipson), with Trevor Horn more in the background (although he had promised the band to be the head producer). There were some increasing irritations within the band, especially between Nash, O'Toole and Gill contra Holly Johnson, who disliked each other's rock star behaviour increasingly. Wah!'s Pete Wylie later claimed to have been asked three times by the lads to replace Holly as a singer, which he refused. In the end, Liverpool was released on October 20, 1986, preceded by the single Rage Hard on August 22, 1986. Liverpool contains only 8 tracks, and sounds definitely different (more noise, more guitars) from most of the material on Welcome To The Pleasuredome. Holly Johnson later said that he didn't like the new style that the Lads were attempting, rather preferring the `electronic dirty disco' style of the first album.
From Liverpool, the singles Warriors Of The Wasteland (November 1986) and Watching The Wildlife (February 1987) were extracted. None of the Liverpool singles enjoyed successes such as with Relax and Two Tribes, but were remixed with a similar kind of enthousiasm by engineers and remixers at Sarm West, notably Robert Kraushaar.
(This section definitely needs more info...)
Raising slightly more than just enthousiasm, FGTH performed a number of tours between 1984 and 1987, showing that they were just as much a live band as they were chart toppers. Their gigs were powerful, humorous, and overwhelming.
Right after Relax hit the top of the UK charts, Frankie set off for their first North-American tour, starting at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and playing Montreal, Washington DC, New York (including a show-up in the Saturday Night Live TV show), Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago (the Bismarck, which indeed almost went down during the FGTH gig), Minneapolis, Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In California, Holly and Paul were asked to figure in a shooting of a sex club scene for Brian DePalma's film Body Double, resulting in a weird clip which stands as one of the best video clips of Relax.
Ironically it was only after the big US tour that Frankie did their first big concert in the UK, in Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre (December 20, 1984).
The first major UK/European tour in 1985 brought Frankie to places such as Dublin, Sheffield, Glasgow, Birmingham, London, Stockholm, Frankfurt (April 22, 1985), ?. Finally, Frankie made it to Japan (Tokyo).
The second major world tour was the one after the release of Liverpool, in 1986/1987. The band was augmented on tour by Ged O'Toole, Mark's brother, who had been in the original line-up of FGTH, to back up Nasher's guitaring. In the beginning of 1986, the second major world tour started in the US and Canada. In Dallas, the opening act was Belouis Some. At that venue, people have witnessed seeing Holly lip-sync during almost the whole show. The tour went, among other places, to Montreal, Toronto, and New York. The keyboards on this branch of the tour were played by Paul Oxendale.
Back in the UK, Frankie played the Wembley stadium in London two times, and toured extensively through continental Europe: Brussels, Paris, Lille, Florence (February, 1987), Modena (January 26, 1987), Berlin (February 6, 1987), Dortmund (February 13, 1987), and Rotterdam (together with Berlin, the band that is).
TOUR DATES (Around the world in mighty ways)
December 1984
20 Liverpool Royal Court
March 1985
12 Dublin Rds Simmonscourt
14 Sheffield City Hall
15 Leicester Demontford Hall
17-18 Newcastle City Hall
20 Glasgow Apollo
23-24 Birmingham Odeon
26-27 Manchester Apollo
31 London Hammersmith Odeon
April 1985
1 London Hammersmith Odeon
3 Brighton Conference Center
4 Bournemouth International Centre
6-7-8 London Hammersmith Odeon
9 Copenhagen
10 Oslo
11 Stockholm Eriksdalshallen
14 Hamburg
15 Berlin
16 Dusseldorf
18 Paris
19 Brussells
20 Rotterdam
22 Frankfurt
23 Munich
24 Basle
May 1985
11 Chicago
12 Cleveland
13 Detroit
15 Toronto
16 Toronto
17 Montreal
18 Boston
20 Washington
21 Philadelphia
23-24 New York
26 Atlanta
28 ? Orlando
29 ? Tampa Bay
30 ? Miami
June 1985
1 New Orleans
4 Houston
5 San Antonio
7 Austin , Texas
8 Dallas
10 Denver
12-13 Los Angeles
15-16 San Francisco Festival
17-18 San Francisco
20 Portland
21 Seattle
22 Vancouver
January 1987
10 Manchester G + Mex Centre
12-13 London Wembley Arena
19 Birmingham N.E.C.
22 Glasgow S.E.C.
26 Modena
27 Rome
28 Florence (Fantastic live concert with over 7,000 people)
29 Milan
30 Padova
February 1987
1-2 Paris
4 Rotterman
6 Berlin
7 Hanover
9 Brussels
10 Frankfurt
12 Munich
13 Dortmund
14 Hamburg
1985 Tour Dates is taken from the Hollywood Fan Club 2nd Issue.
1987 Tour Dates is taken from the Back Cover of Warriors Attack Mix (12ztak25) that not include the concerts in Florence(28-01-87) and Modena (26-01-87)
The contract that FGTH had signed at the beginning of its existence was never updated or reformulated, which had more and more negative effects on financial returns for the members of FGTH. Holly Johnson was most keen on renegotiating the contract, being the writer of both lyrics and most of the melodies (notably of the successful singles). ZTT, however, were reluctant in renegotiating. Then Holly decided to go to court, wanting to go solo, if necessary joining another record company. After Holly had officially left FGTH, ZTT and Holly met in court. The process was followed very carefully by the press. Although hardly news, the international press jumped on the story of Trevor Horn having recorded Relax and Two Tribes on his own (Horn remarked at that time that the reason Relax sounds so extremely sexual was that he was in a period of abstention because his wife was pregnant; he was quite horny at the time, so to speak). The judge finally decided that the contract with ZTT was limiting Holly Johson from pursuing a normal career, meaning that ZTT lost the case, had to pay for Holly's court costs, and also meaning that Holly Johnson was free to join the UK branch of record company MCA.
The termination of FGTH marked the beginning of solo careers of both Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford. Holly teamed up with producers Steve Lovell (who once played the guitar in the pre-FGTH Hollycaust), Stephen Hague, and the late Dan Hartman and has released several singles and three albums (Blast, 1989; Hollelujah, remix compilation album, 1990; and Dreams That Money Can't Buy, 1991). Paul Rutherford released an album called Oh World (1989).
The lads, O'Toole, Nash, and Gill, were determined to go on after Liverpool as a band with a new singer. Under the name Shuffle Brothers they aired an ad on Music Box in 1987 asking for interested singers to apply for the job. The ad featured some demo take-outs which sounded a lot like the Liverpool-Frankie. The band never released any material. During a period of two years, two singers were recruited: first came Dee Harris (ex-Fashion), then came Grant Boult. In 1992, Boult and Nash formed Low, releasing a single, Tearing my soul apart, and recording an album, Enter the Bigger Reality (produced by Steve Lovell!). The single, partly a remnant from the Shuffle Brothers period (authors Boult, Gill, Harris, Nash, O'Toole), was released; the album wasn't, due to the unfortunate fact of the record company (Swanyard Records) going bust. Brian Nash went on and formed a band called Dr Jolly's Salvation Circus, who have released a self-named demo. Other members of DJSC were Grant Boult (again; on vocals), Reg Ab Gwyneth (bass), and Paul Pridmore (drums). In DJSC Nasher felt he was doing more than fair share of everything that keeps a band going so he decided to have a go by himself. At the moment Nasher is due to release a new album called Ripe where several musicians contributed to the recording of the album. The album will be released in June 1999.
Ped has been pretty active in the music business after Frankie and the Shuffle Brothers, and still very much is. He is currently involved in the acts Lovestation, Eden, Slapback, all signed to UK-based Fresh Records. Currently (June 1997) Ped is involved in making an album for the German dance label Eye-Q Records, and has his own sound site on the web. A new album from Lovestation is going to be released this year.
Holly Johnson, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in the period of his second solo album, is keeping as healthy as possible, painting, writing and occasionally singing (e.g., on Sakamoto's Sweet Revenge album from 1994, and the single Legendary Children (All Of Them Queer) also from 1994). He is at the moment working on a new album called Soulstream which will be released during the summer 1999. A new single from that album called Hallelujah are at the moment only released as a DJ promo single. The first commercial release will be Disco Heaven.
In 1993, ZTT celebrated their 10th anniversary. Record-wise, this resulted in a ZTT remix compilation
album, Zance, but more importantly, in a series of FGTH reissues and new remixes of Relax, Two
Tribes, The Power Of Love, and Welcome To The Pleasuredome, released in 1993 and 1994, topped
by the video compilation Shoot!, `greatest hits' album Bang!, and, completing the action of gun firing,
Reload, a collection of old and new (previously released) remixes.