Last night was my 36th high school reunion. Technically, the proper milestone would have been *last* year (35th, as we all love tidy increments of five), but because of COVID, that was reduced, last year, to a chaotic zoom call. But probably because COVID is still with us (thanks to the willfully ignorant and vax-reluctant), this 36th wasn’t quite as robustly attended as it might’ve otherwise been. Still, as my son now goes to the same school (and was giving tours to crotchety alumni), I felt obligated to go. Plus, y’know … open bar. Who am I to turn my nose up at that?
In any case, given my heartily cultivated neuroses, I, of course, arrived bang on time. This is a long-standing problem. Throughout my teens and twenties, I used to arrive at parties at the specified times, only to hear the sound of hairdryers still blowing behind front doors, prompting the necessity to walk around the block three or four times before making a more well-timed, fashionably tardy entrance. Not wanting to (still) be that guy, I decided to take a leisurely stroll around the surrounding environs before making the scene, so to speak. To score said stroll, I selected an album that was period-specific to my high school years, that being Welcome To The Pleasuredome by ye olde Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
While ambling south down Fifth Avenue, beneath the magisterial edifice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized I probably hadn’t listened to this record in any real capacity in decades. Richly over-the-top and somewhat ridiculously overproduced (thanks, I believe, to former Buggle/Yes knob-twiddler Trevor Horn) Welcome To The Pleasuredome is a sumptuous and suitably audacious affair, but still kinda completely rocks (that bass!) Heard through the prism of 2021, where songs like “WAP” and “Pu$$y Fairy” win prestigious industry accolades, “Relax” *still* manages to sound uproariously un-nuanced and strenuously inappropriate in its espousal of indiscriminate ejaculation. “Two Tribes” hasn’t aged quite so well, and suffers from a bit of frowny heavy-handedness, considering the libidinous reverie of the rest of the album. But it still has that bass to recommend it, unlike “The Power of Love,” which remains po-faced and ponderous. Who decided to put an earnest Christmas carol on an album otherwise preoccupied with carnal gratification? There are also the covers — The Temptations’ “War” and a cheeky swish through Springsteen’s “Born to Run” — but neither threaten the main attractions here.
For me, though, the real revelation was the title track, a sprawling, thirteen plus minute suite, veering from the wide-screen audio depiction of a verdant garden of abundance into a driving, bass-driven odyssey ripe with lush and surprising sounds and instrumentation -- washes of space-age synthesizers, periodic bursts of clangy guitars, Morricone-cribbed “HOO HAH” chants and even a chugging harmonica subtly buried in the mix. The lyrics may not be the band’s finest work (“there goes a supernova … what a pushover!”), but Frankie never claimed to be profound.
As a single piece of music, the suite of “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” is practically as expansive and cinematic as latter-era Pink Floyd, albeit the horniest and gayest Pink Floyd you could ever hope to hear. That aspect really cannot be overstated, though. I would have been a high school junior upon first hearing the whole Welcome to the Pleasuredome album and otherwise slavishly devoted to laughably hyper-masculine punk, hardcore and heavy metal records. While just shy of any brazen bluntness (Holly Johnson’s zealous pronunciation of the present-tense verb/descriptor, “ERECT” while quoting Coleridge notwithstanding), Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut opus was still such a proudly in-your-face celebration of myriad facets of human sexuality. As a result, it felt a thousand times more taboo and dangerous than anything Suicidal Tendencies or Iron Maiden could ever hope to offer.
Even as the pimply and introverted geek that I was, I indeed knew what this album was all about. Much like “Love My Way” by the Psychedelic Furs, it duly fired my imagination about the mysterious realms of intimate physical interaction (a realm I would still be some years away from attaining, not for any lack of trying). It didn’t matter to me that these songs were almost certainly about gay sex — they were about sex, and performed in a manner that addressed the subject in a comparatively more welcoming, healthier and more relatable way than as handled on, say, Shout at the Devil by Motley Crue or Fair Warning by Van Halen, where sexual scenarios were invariably more predatory than celebratory. These songs, like the afore-cited “Love My Way” before them, scored many a fantasy of dancefloor and boudoir escapades with various ladies from my high school who shall remain forever nameless. While those ornate dreams were ultimately never realized, they still vividly exist in three-dimensional technicolor within the grooves of Welcome to The Pleasuredome.
How is this record regarded today? As far as I know, it hasn’t been feted with any critical reappraisal. No one’s penned a 331/3 edition about it (like Annie Zaleski’s excellent recent one on Rio by Duran Duran). ls it perceived as too empty, arch, affected or topically irresponsible? Is it marred by its proudly lavish production? I don’t quite understand it
As the title track came to its preposterous signature climax with Holly Johnson’s campy cackle roaring through my headphones, I glanced at my watch. It was time. I stepped inside my former high school with the impossibly bacchanalian strains of Welcome to the Pleasuredome still ringing in my ears to re-join the ranks of my now middle-aged classmates to reconvene and reminisce.
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