Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Welcome To The Pleasuredome
Featured Album
The ultimate '80s pop album?
Although no one but the ludicrously gung-ho British music press wanted to admit it at the time, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome is in many ways the ultimate '80s pop album. First off, produced by Trevor Horn (the savant of plastic fantastic '80s studio wizardry), it sounds amazing. The detail and epic sweep of the best tracks were, and remain, stunning — like all the best bits of ABC, Duran Duran, Blancmange, Naked Eyes, the Art of Noise and Heaven 17 compressed into one utterly over-the-top package. While the album's delicious sonic qualities helped usher in baroque Hi-NRG as the new lingua franca of Euro-pop (think Dead or Alive, Rick Astley, Kylie, etc), Pleasure Dome also epitomized another definitively '80s conceit — music as marketing exercise, as pseudo-Situationist prank, as scam. The media/t-shirt campaign designed by journalist Paul Morley that accompanied the album's release threatened to outshine the music, not least because the album really has only three ideas: two politico-pornographic synth-pop perennials (“Relax” and “Two Tribes”), one tour de force of studiocraft (the title track) and one supremely gloopy ballad (“The Power of Love”). While Pleasure Dome exemplifies the Reagan/Thatcher era notion that music hardly exists outside of its context, fresh ears will be able to hear this album without being tainted by the attendant hype and appreciate Horn's achievement on its own terms.
