Welcome to The Pleasuredome & Perfect Strangers
Friday is about music — today, two of my favourite albums from the 80s celebrate their 40th birthdays this week
When I was a kid, Welcome To The Pleasuredome by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was seemingly everywhere. Thanks in large part to the dominate single, Relax. And the title track. And that big cynical Power of Love song with its tacked-on Christmas video to help sell it. But I didn’t care about any of that. I just liked the songs. And then my older brother bought the album — and I enjoyed the weird fact that the album contained a bunch of cover versions. War (“what is it good for”) which I loved (the original) from the Tour of Duty soundtrack, and general Vietnam-era/60s revival which drifted in as the 80s ended. And Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run which was interesting, because it was different — and seemed insincere, but fun. And Do You Know The Way To San Jose, which, again, arrived just as I was recognising that many of these great songs from the sixties that I kinda loved were all by Burt Bacharach.
This was me listening to Frankie a few years after the album was released — but yeah, it became a favourite. And in the 90s, a decade or so after it had been a thing, and the band was basically written off as a one-hit-wonder, I got really into the album. By then I was into most of the things Trevor Horn had done; love his big neon-80s production!
Welcome To The Pleasuredome was one of those albums I owned on all three formats — at various times. Tape first, then CD, then the double vinyl. Studying Coleridge at university and reading Kubla Khan and then hearing the mention of Xanadu and Kubla Khan in the lyrics to Pleasurdome’s epic album-version of the title track (some 13 minutes) and thinking it suddenly so profound. When of course it’s not. It’s mumbo-jumbo at best (but hey, so is the Coleridge poem, ultimately).
The folly pop of Holly Johnson and his gang wasn’t far off the opium-dream unfinished poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge I suppose. Coleridge just never got to benefit from Trevor Horn’s production. It might have helped, if only we could bend time. Remember Mary Shelley, writer of Frankenstein, hid behind a couch when Coleridge read his poems aloud. So. There.
I just assumed everyone loved Welcome to the Pleasuredome — and when I had my first go at writing “retro” record reviews (remembering favourite albums from the 80s) the editor of the student rag told me I needed to think of something better than silly old Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
A wee while back I got a bit nostalgic for the album, having not heard it in quite some time — and then I saw that it was the record’s 40th birthday this week. So I gave it a spin. And look, maybe it’s not actually the classic I thought it was. I’m ready to acknowledge that. But something funny happens when you spend time with a thing, right? I still hear that run of covers as actually quite exhilarating. The one-two of Pleasuredome and Relax as the big-serve start to the album, and The Power of Love as an epic closer. Yeah-yeah, it’s an over the top power ballad. But that’s what power ballads are! Anne Dudley’s string arrangement for the fucking win, yo.
If you haven’t heard Pleasuredome all the way through ever, or in an age, I’m saying give it a hoon today, or this weekend. And let me know what you think. Friend or foe? Folly, or Holly Johnson was actually great? The band only really made this one album. Well, there was a second, called Liverpool, and though, at uni, I went out and bought that, it would have been better if I didn’t.
Another album I’d been thinking about revisiting, thinking about writing something in praise of, totally incongruous when mentioned alongside Frankie Goes To Hollywood, is Perfect Strangers by Deep Purple. But I held off because it was only last year that I did a big Purple (prose) gush about the band in general:
When I discovered Deep Purple, I was a big-time cassette tape buyer. And I’d go in each week, with my lawn mowing money, and I’d buy whatever Deep Purple tape I could find. They were between reunions when I discovered them — so it was Mark I and Mark III and Mark IV and Mark II in jumbled order, and then I bought Perfect Strangers — the 1984 “reunion” album that features the classic Mark II lineup (Machine Head, Smoke On The Water, etc). This reunion shouldn’t have worked, but it did. And this album — almost Spinal Tap-like in conceit (the band puts aside its differences, lucrative tour, decides to record new material) — is easily one of the band’s very best. It arrived right as band that had been influenced by the bands that Deep Purple had influenced were having their day. So you had Metallica, via Iron Maiden and the like, via Deep Purple. And you had Deep Purple! You had Deep Purple alongside Van Halen and Maiden and AC/DC and Whitesnake (with its obvious Deep Purple affiliations). You had Deep Purple alongside Def Leppard. It was interesting. And it worked. They reached all the way back to the sixties, but they were contemporary-ish in the 80s too.
But I was hearing this version of Deep Purple at exactly that same time as I was hearing some of the other Mark II albums from the early 70s. And it just pretty much lined up. Because it was all new to me. I mean obviously the production is different, the subject matter is (a little bit) different. But it’s just a kick-ass rock/metal album. It’s maybe barely very “metal” in energy, especially now, but it is classic old school metal in the style, the vibe, the look, the feel.
I put on Perfect Strangers to listen again, and straight away I’m into it. I discovered that, weirdly, it was released the same day as Welcome To The Pleasuredome. That’s about all they have in common. Two very different British bands from two different eras released albums at very different stages in their careers on the same day.
And today I decided to write about it.
That’s the gist of it all.
If you’ve never listened to Perfect Strangers I recommend it. If you really don’t like anything “classic rock” or metal-adjacent then it’s obviously not for you. But I’d like to think, still, that somewhere, someone is about to listen to Deep Purple’s Perfect Strangers and decide they really quite like it, even as they might well have figured it to not be for them at all.
That’ll do for today. I’m on holiday. Recovering still from Travis Scott:
But, as always, I’ve got a playlist for ya. This one is very chill — not a single Deep Purple, Frankie, or Travis song to be heard. So I hope you enjoy that. And I hope you have a great weekend.