Welcome to the Frankie beat.... (Welcome To The Pleasuredome - Frankie Goes To Hollywood)

Member Name: JohnC

Product:	Welcome To The Pleasuredome - Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Date:	31/12/00 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Al the best Frankie stuff

Disadvantages: A bit if filler material

Frankie’s first and finest album, with ‘best of’ thrown in for good measure. This album features all the reasons Frankie became famous as well as infamous, namely ‘The Power of Love’, ‘Two Tribes’ and ‘Relax’.

The album opens with a surrealistic track called ‘The World is my Oyster’ giving a trendy, ‘pastiche’ feel to the album, quickly followed by a ‘snatch of fury’. By track three (Welcome to the Pleasure Dome) we are into the typical Frankie ‘beat’ so characteristic of their work and engineered by master producer (‘and all that’ as the credits state) Trevor Horn.

By track three we are into Frankie proper with the insistent and catchy ‘Relax’, made to flow so much by Horn’s production, which gives the staccato original it’s real flow or ‘beat’ as it sounds here. The beat goes on with Edwin Starr’s classic ‘War’ which would have sounded so much better had it not been placed in between ‘Relax and ‘Two Tribes’ making all part of a drum pattern exercise for Horn’s eager imagination. The highly prominent bass line makes this song great, the Ronald Reagan impersonation less so. As if segued together comes Frankie’s other number one, in the genre, ‘Two Tribes’, one of many version that seem to have been around at the time.

We then have a rather pleasant change of mood with a fast paced version of Springsteen’s ‘Born to run’. Nice. What follows are several self indulgent, Horn beat-inspired songs of less than memorable quality. But the best is of course kept until last.

The album closes (almost) with Frankie’s best song of all ‘Power of Love’. A beautiful balled starting of with the nonsensical ‘I’ll protect you from the hooded claw, keep the vampires from your door’R
30;hmmm…nice! This may be a karaoke singer’s dream but it still remains an evocative love song aimed at everyone and everything to ‘make love your goal’.

The sleeve notes from the drummer, Brian Nash, best sum up the album and state:
“It’s pleasing to think that something we’ve done is something that will be remembered. Something we’ve done will go down as an all time classic. It becomes part of people’s lives, their memories, their hopes…But if it all ends tomorrow, we’ve had a good ride, we’ve seen what it’s like (sic)”.

Brian was in many ways correct, Frankie will be remembered for ‘Relax’ and ‘The Power of love’, but it all seemed to end very quickly after this album. As the closing words of the album go (courtesy of Mr. Reagan) “Frankie says……..No More”.

Probably for the best!

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