FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD – Welcome To The Pleasuredome [Deluxe Edition] (2025)

Not the typical style of music we feature here, but darn, this is pure ’80s… FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD 1984’s hit album ”Welcome To The Pleasuredome” is being reissued as a deluxe edition, in various formats.

The album features the three UK No. 1 singles ‘Relax‘, ‘Two Tribes‘, and ‘The Power of Love‘ along with the 12 minute album version of the title track which reached No. 2 in 1985, in single form. Other highlights include ‘War’, ‘The World Is My Oyster’, ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Black Night White Light’.
This deluxe edition put together for the first time in conjunction with the band, features a bunch of unreleased tracks and takes the listener on a journey from the band’s earliest demos and BBC Radio One Sessions through the singles to the album and beyond.

At the time of its release, “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” resulted a ‘subversive’ debut from the UK synth-pop group, an exquisite-sounding album that snuck an ode to amyl nitrate and orgasms onto pop charts around the world.
The man behind success was producer Trevor Horn, the studio wizard behind era-defining hits like the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” and Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” The album, and especially the hit ‘Relax’, delivered the definition of ‘huge synths’.
Horn had at his disposal a Fairlight CMI, the nascent digital audio workstation newly favored by Alan Parsons, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock. “He was one of about three people in England who owned and knew how to use a Fairlight computer synthesizer,” said the band’s singer Paul Rutherford. The machine enabled precise visual sequencing; you could etch melodies and rhythmic patterns directly on the screen with a light pen. It was also the first commercially available digital sampler that could record sounds directly into the machine and play them back at any pitch on the keyboard.

Think of the flush that must have crept over Mike Read’s face the moment he realized that when Frankie sang “come,” they meant cum. Pupils and capillaries dilated, he must have scanned the lyrics printed on the sleeve of “Relax” and read the word “suck” as if for the first time in his life.
By the time the BBC 1 Radio DJ declared the song “obscene” on air, “Relax” had already become a mainstay on his station—contemporary estimates say it played 70 to 100 times in six weeks—extolling the pleasures of gay sex to some thousands of unsuspecting listeners. Eleven days into 1984, “Relax” fluttered to No. 6 on the UK charts. Yanked from airplay, it soared to the top by the end of the month.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood arrived in a splash of scandal, pressurizing dancefloors with euphoric club mixes. With “The Power of Love,” they also insisted that sexual and spiritual ecstasies need not be mutually exclusive. Far from it—they feed each other.
”Welcome To The Pleasuredome” rang out into the years that followed, emblematizing the ’80s and loosening the way for bands like Erasure, who would carry a similar torch into the rave years. The album turned out to be the apex of Frankie’s short-lived career. They followed it in 1986 with Liverpool, which flopped, and disbanded in the wake of intra-band aesthetic conflict and legal scuffles with their record label.

CD 1 : Welcome To The Pleasuredome
01 – well….
02 – The World Is My Oyster
03 – Snatch Of Fury (Stay)
04 – Welcome To The Pleasuredome
05 – Relax (Come Fighting)
06 – War (…And Hide)
07 – Two Tribes (For The Victims Of Ravishment)
08 – (Tag)
09 – Ferry (Go)
10 – Born To Run
11 – San Jose (The Way)
12 – Wish (The Lads Were Here)
13 – Including The Ballad Of 32
14 – Krisco Kisses
15 – Black Night White Light
16 – The Only Star In Heaven
17 – The Power Of Love
18 – bang…

CD 2 : Previously Unreleased
01 – Relax (In Heaven) (Arista Demo, 11-13 September 1982)
02 – Love Has Got A Gun (Phonogram Demo, 15 October 1982)
03 – Krisco Kisses (BBC Radio 1 John Peel Session, 1982)
04 – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (BBC Radio 1 Kid Jenson Session, 1983)
05 – Two Tribes (Newsnight Version)
06 – The Power Of Love (Strings Only)
07 – The World Is My Oyster (12” Version)
08 – Black Night White Light (Extended)
09 – War (Europe A Go Go Soundcheck)
10 – Born To Run (Europe A Go Go Soundcheck)
11 – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (The World Is My Oyster) (12” Version)
12 – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (Ad Lib)
13 – The Only Star In Heaven (Starfix)
14 – Disneyland (ZTT Sampled)
15 – Relax (Arrival – Early Version)
16 – Two Tribes (Video Destructo Mix)

Holly Johnson – vocals
Paul Rutherford – vocals
Brian Nash – guitar
Mark O’Toole – bass guitar
Peter Gill – drums
J. J. Jeczalik – keyboards, programming, software
Steve Howe – acoustic guitar on “Welcome to the Pleasuredome”
Trevor Horn – programming, Fairlight CMI, backing vocals, bass guitar

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