Frankie Say We Go Big Bang

By JAY COCKS

Pop culture is blitzed again by another British import

The formula is right on the album. It is all out front, easy enough to hear: grandiloquent dance songs with pastiche lyrics, bass lines tough as marching orders and electronic production so enveloping that listening to the music becomes an almost suffocating physical experience, like being buried up to the ears in singing sand. But for those with a more fanciful turn of mind, the folks bringing us Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the newest in an apparently seasonal series of pop apocalypses imported from England, have provided a graphic rendering of the formula right on the sleeve of their new album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome. Follow this, now: a couple of swimming zygotes, plus a single bullet, a heart and a cross, all multiplied by a shadow figure grabbing a star equals -- well, BANG!

Further amplification is provided. "Lust plus fear plus love plus faith times Frankie equals some kind of bang." And, it might be added, a considerable amount of bucks. None of the heart-stopping chart figures chronicling Frankie's astounding home land success are provided, perhaps because the stats are so widely known and already en route into the pantheon of pop trivia.

Consider: ZTT, the parent company of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, has sold almost 10 million pieces of FGTH vinyl. Relax, the first smash Frankie single, released just over a year ago, is now the fourth-bestselling record in British history, a banned by the BBC did much to ensure. Two Tribes, the follow-up to Relax, was a scornful antiwar song that sailed straight to No. 1 in the first week of its release. Frankie has now sold more records more quickly than any other group since the Beatles. "We're the image of England 1984," says Holly Johnson, 24, Frankie's vocalist. Others see something a little different. Wrote Rock Commentator Simon Frith, after watching tourists in London buy up countless knockoffs of the band's FRANKIE SAY T shirts: "I decided this was the final triumph of the 'new pop,' the eclipse of content by form."

The eclipse can now be seen from North America, as the band launches its first tour any time, anywhere. Frankie has yet to make a deep dent in the U.S. charts; they are still more of a curiosity Stateside than a genuine phenomenon, which raises the question of why they did not start to concertize on home turf. Catching the group live may provide an answer. They need the studio, with all its electronics and synthesized sleight of hand; they need the invention of Producer Trevor Horn, his ability to sandwich them like luncheon meat between thick layers of sound. They got famous before they got good.

The three musicians in the crowd are Bass Player Mark O'Toole, Drummer Peter ("Fed") Gill, both 20, and Lead Guitarist Brian ("Nasher") Nash, 21. Johnson, who is front man as well as vocalist, comes on as the archetypal Brit pop poofter, waving a salmon-colored silk scarf as he wafts his way through Springsteen's Born to Run. Boomed a member of the rehearsal audience at Frankie's Saturday Night Live appearance two weeks ago: "Bruce is better!"

And different, Lord knows, even though, little more than a year ago, Frankie was a Liverpool band living the kind of hard-knocks working-class life Springsteen sings about so often. "I was drawing -L-23.50 on the dole," Johnson recalls. "I'd been on it for five years. No jobs around, y'know." It says something about the disparate nature of contemporary rock culture in England and America that, while Springsteen has achieved his greatest popular success staying close, spiritually and thematically, to the working class, Frankie Goes to Hollywood has hit big by escaping into giddy fantasy. "We're as political as boys in the street could be," insists Paul Rutherford, 24, who bangs a tambourine and cavorts in some semblance of choreography while Johnson sings. They came from one of the most disenfranchised cities in Mrs. Thatcher's England and hit big at a time of bitterly divisive labor strife, but the band's response to this is to salve everything under a coating of helpless hedonism. Relax.

Two Tribes is being promoted with a deft, rabble-rousing video: two actors impersonating Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko meet in a pit and have a geriatric brawl, slugging, biting and kneeing each other until the audience around them erupts and the world blows apart. The suspicion remains that this is less politics than posture, the kind of invention that is a specialty of Rock Critic S Paul Morley, a former New Musical Express gadfly who creates Frankie's image the way Trevor Horn sculpts their music. Morley, who likes to sport a T shirt announcing PROPAGANDA WILL GIVE YOU THE TRUTH, may playfully refer to himself as a "semiotician," but he revels in the show-biz bunkum of Barnum, Ziegfeld and Colonel Tom Parker. He seems to operate from one bedrock truth: hip is the ultimate con. "I condemned [manipulation] when it was done badly," he told the London Times. "Great manipulation I adore."

It was Morley's notion to co-opt the earnest, sloganeering T shirts of Designer Katharine Hamnett and make them over into a campaign of bulletins from the band: FRANKIE SAY RELAX. FRANKIE SAY ARM THE UNEMPLOYED. The band is also backing off its raunchy, rough-trade image for something almost genteel. Decked out in haute funk and aiming to please, the boys will finish their American tour in Los Angeles in two weeks, then fly back home, where Welcome to the Pleasuredome racked up a record advance sale of 1.1 million albums before its release three weeks ago.

They are discussing a British tour and now, for public consumption, minimizing all the fuss. "We've sold a lot of records, more than anyone," says Rutherford.

"That's it, that's all there is to understand.

People like us, they understand us, they want us. What more can you ask?" Frankie say that's it. But a rip-off Frankie T shirt say it better than Frankie say. Rip off say WHO GIVES A F-- WHAT FRANKIE SAY? And what Frankie say to that? A moment of silence. Please.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Adam Zagorin/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Adam Zagorin