Nostalgia...
Click to viewFGTH, US debut in 1984 on Saturday Night Live, with a nice intro by George Carlin, who was probably extremely high.
As much as a guilty pleasure as Frankie Goes to Hollywood is for me, one has to concede that they were a pretty damn good live band, and the songs on their debut album were written and performed by them (well, except for "Relax", which is all Trevor Horn, and the only lad on the track is singer Holly Johnson), and they were able to reproduce the tracks live, with and without Horn, who can clearly be seen on keyboards here (still in his Buggles big round glasses phase).
In many ways I feel sorry for the lads, swept up into Horn's big dreams and enormous production values. Johnson would later say in his autobiography that he and the rest of the band were so overwhelmed by Horn that they simply agreed to whatever he suggested. They were a solid dance band; they'd been together (in one form or another) since the mid 1970s. Most of the songs on their debut album were completely formed by the time Horn got a hold of them and overproduced them into oblivion.
Clearly here the main bassline is synthesized; one would need 2 or 3 competent bassists to reproduce that massive bass riff (Geddy Lee could do it, Horn himself probably could, and I could name a few others). Mark O'Toole is a good bassist, he's playing a 5-string here for the fills and embellishments. But that's Horn for you. There also is an extra guitarist here playing the leads.
The only real fudge I detected was Holly missing his mark for the "Cowboy number one" lyric ("Cowboy number one/a born again poor man's son"). The intro seen here was common for FGTH to perform live even before Trevor Horn became their producer.
Still memories abound. When one is a politically-minded, intelligent gay teenager, 17 in 1984 when FGTH really hit and absolutely convinced that the US and the Soviet Union were going to annihilate the planet, Frankie's sincere form of irony-laden, over-marketed, over-produced, politically-charged, grab-the-money-but-have-a-message (however thinly sliced), gay dance pop was just the ticket. I loved everything about them, from their infectious dance groove to their sarcastic, ironic marketing, to their overcoats and scarves on stage.
To paraphrase the Moz: and in my bedroom in that ugly new apartment building, I danced my legs, down to the knees...