#rage hard

The Vinyl of the Day is ‘Liverpool’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, 1986. After their explosive debut album ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ that made them a world-wide sensation the likes of which have seldom been seen, it was almost impossible for FGTH to come up with a follow-up that wouldn’t disappoint - and that was what happened with ‘Liverpool’. The two records were completely different; ‘Pleasuredome’ was what might have been the perfect 80s synth/club albume that was almost wholly the work of producer Trevor Horn, who either played all the instruments himself, or hired studio musicians to record. The only member of Frankie to really be involved was Holly Johnson -  but with ‘Liverpool’, the album's production was handled by Trevor Horn’s engineer Stephen Lipson, who urged the band to play their own instruments on this album. ‘Liverpool’ therefore features a heavier rock sound than its predecessor, and it was not at all what fans expected or wanted. 

'Liverpool' consists of 8 songs with no funny tags or conversations squeezed in between them. It kicks off with 'Warriors Of The Wasteland', at first atmospheric and then aggressive, and continues with the pleasantly bombastic 'Rage Hard', arguably the best song on the album. The contents of the disc are actually quite varied. There is guitar rock on 'Kill The Pain', a sequencer/synth orgy on 'Maximum Joy', and lush orchestrated sounds on 'Watching The Wildlife'. The album closes with the atmospheric 'Is Anybody Out There?' which is just as moving as 'The Power Of Love' off their debut. If you can manage to separate the music from all the things that happened during the recording (there was a huge 3-way battle between Trevor Horn, Holly Johnson and everyone else in the band constant fighting about which direction the album should take) this actually is an album of very enjoyable songs produced in the typical perfectionist, larger-than-life Horn/Lipson fashion and performed energeticly by the band.

Of course this was FGTH’s second and last album, as the acrimony boiled over, with Holly Johnson leaving the band following the corresponding world tour. But few bands made such a big mark on the music scene and culture of the times as Frankie did, and they left a pretty damned fun legacy. 

BBC Review by Paul Lester

Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1986 follow-up to their Welcome to the Pleasuredome debut was always going to seem like a let-down, so comprehensively did that debut double-album, and its attendant three chart-topping singles (and number two-peaking title-track), dominate 1984-85. If anything, it represented a volte-face after the OTT magnificence of that first foray, as much as a climb-down as ABC’s Beauty Stab and Simple Minds’ Sparkle in the Rain, those other early-80s albums where the bands in question retreated from studio opulence towards a more ‘authentic’ approach that proved they could reproduce the music live; that they were Proper Rock Bands.

Not that Liverpool was lacking in bombast; far from it. In some ways it was even more of an epic folly than Pleasuredome. Only this was Frankie’s folly: perhaps why it didn’t achieve anything like the success of its predecessor. This time, the band played a far heavier role in the sound and overall direction, ‘heavy’ being the operative word: many of the tracks are straight hard rock/metal, with the lavish sonics and orchestral pomp typical of the ZTT label dropped on top. Production über-führer Trevor Horn may have withdrawn, but Stephen Lipson, who had worked on Propaganda’s A Secret Wish the year before, was on board to keep things pumped and polished.

If the results are a bit of a mess, it’s partly explained by the torturous process that saw Frankie, tax exiles in Ireland, travel between studios in Ibiza, Holland and London as they sought to find gold (or rather, platinum – Pleasuredome sold three million copies) for a second time. Several of those Ibiza demos were rejected, but you can now hear them, on this deluxe two-CD reissue. It adds no fewer than seven tracks, including cover versions of Bowie, Doors and Stones songs, to the original eight-track album on disc one, with a further eight unreleased tracks and mega-mixes on disc two.

Of the original Liverpool tracks, Warriors of the Wasteland sets the shrill, histrionic tone. Rage Hard, the first single, is probably the one that best holds up alongside those monumental first four singles. On Kill the Pain you can hear the compromise between the album the Lads (drummer Peter Gill, bassist Mark O’Toole and guitarist Brian Nash) wanted to make, singer Holly Johnson’s lyrical visions, and ZTT’s more commercial instincts. Maximum Joy sounds like an off-cut from A Secret Wish, while Watching the Wildlife, despite its symphonic surges and pop hooks, is the one that signalled Frankie’s demise, only reaching number 28 when it was released as a single in February 1987.

The unreleased tracks, even those ill-advised covers, will prove fascinating to Frankie-philes, especially the funk-metal of Delirious, ambient textures of The Waves and Our Silver Turns to Gold, which presents a stripped-down Frankie, without overdubs or embellishments, showing their highly idiosyncratic approach to songcraft. It’s a superb repackage of what remains one of the great anticlimaxes in pop.

Rage Hard was released almost thirty years ago (August 1986). I remember seeing Frankie Goes To Hollywood live on TV that year playing the single and shocking parents all around with their rowdy stage antics and the rumored gayness of one/several/all band members (I honestly can’t remember exactly and frankly,I didn’t care then and don’t care now). I loved it. tapping into the energy and mass marketed rebellion the band offered.