Category: Frankie Goes To Hollywood

A guest posting by Steve McLean

This is a strange one. Usually when a band finds themselves ‘cloned’ there’s a link to the original group. It could be a manager or former member or even a record company who have ended up owning the name. The New Frankie Goes To Hollywood was seemingly just a group of geezers from Alabama who thought ‘fuck it, no one will ever find out, it’s Alabama’

According to an article archived on the Zttaat.com website the group were formed by Davey Johnson who wasn’t in anyway related to Holly Johnson. In fact, he was so unrelated that his name wasn’t even Johnson, he was a bloke called RD Turner. This didn’t stop initial reports claiming he was Holly Johnson’s brother.

Very few publications did enough fact checking into Turner’s background but after the legend of brotherly love was proven to be false, the story was changed to Turner being a member of the band, at least in the studio. The press releases made the bold claim that he was one of the musicians who played on Welcome To The Pleasuredome.

“[Davey] never toured with the group but was a studio musician with the original group,” Chuck Harris of Visual Arts Group speaking to Pollstar. May, 2000.

A bold claim that Trevor Horn, Welcome to the Pleasuredome album producer refutes;

“It was a very small nucleus of people that worked on Pleasuredome and I go out of my way to credit.”  Trevor Horn, Spin Magazine 2000

As usual with these things, the local newspapers where happy to re-print the press copy with little or no pushback. Slowly over time the national magazines took an interest and Davey Johnson’s story then evolved.

According to an issue of Spin Magazine in 2000, Davey Johnson and bandmate Will Martin claimed to be ‘great friends’ with the Frankie lads even though the band deny ever meeting them..

The same magazine goes on to claim that the band’s manager Chuck Harris also represented an act called “The Great Regurgitator” and a guy who can fart to the tune of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”

Frank(ie)ly I can’t believe Chuck has had to go to such duplicitous lengths with Davey Johnson when his other acts sound fucking awesome.

“(The Great Regurgitator) He makes $250,000 per year doing that.” Chuck Harris, The New Frankie Goes To Hollywood Manager, Spin Magazine.

Turner’s claims that he was related to Holly and that he had appeared on the debut album ‘Welcome To The Pleasure Dome’ fell apart like the Monty Python sketch where the guy reckons he wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, the claim breaks down under them most basic scrutiny. Such scrutiny like “Are you really related to Holly Johnson? Because he said you’re not” and “What were you, a man from Alabama, doing in a Liverpool recording studio in the early 80s with a then relatively unknown band?”

The usual ‘legal right’ claims were blabbered by those close to the group. It’s often code for ‘morally wrong’.

Harris also told Pollster that he couldn’t remember which album Davey Johnson played on but insisted he had the legal right to tour under the name.

“Davey legitimately went down and hired an attorney and paid the price to register that name legally” Chuck Harris, Fort Worth Star Telegram May 2000

This is probably because the proper Frankie Goes To Hollywood never got a US Federal Trademark for their name, so Davey Johnson was able to register a local one in Alabama. “Hey folks, we’re legal in ‘Bama.” yeah well, so is fucking a pick-up truck if you plan to marry it.

Starting out they just pretended to be Frankie Goes To Hollywood, they copped a bit of heat from Holly Johnson and his legal team, so they soon changed their name to The New Frankie Goes to Hollywood featuring Davey Johnson. When a case like this happens, the response often seems to be about buying time until the operation is shut down completely.

For live gigs the band were represented by Richard Lustig of Lustig Talent. Formed in the 1980s, the agency still runs today and proudly states on their website the “Lustig Talent Enterprises has since been providing entertainment for casinos, city sponsored events, corporate events, fairs, festivals, night clubs and theaters”. Their page also claims to have represent quite a number of bands who have had dubious line-ups. I don’t know which versions Lustig represented but the likes of Ratt, Bill Haley’s Comets, The Boxtops, The Drifters, The Coasters and Badfinger are mentioned on the site and all have had multiple versions at some point or other.

Often there’s an unbelievable naivety in statements from promoters or managers of these bands. Now I’m not someone who calls out the promoters of reconstituted acts as slimy, lying, duplicitous bastards, but if I was then I’d follow it up with a comment like ‘yeah, but do they have any faults’. However usually the press blurbs reek of disingenuousness.

“When we originally started out, that’s what we were calling it (of the name Frankie Goes to Hollywood). Months ago, we started changing all the promo material and everything over because we were running into the problem that people weren’t understanding and were misconstruing what the group exactly was. So we said, ‘Let’s change it to The New Frankie Goes To Hollywood so people will know that this is different.” Richard Lustiq, Lustiq Talent, Pollster May 2000

Now you might find it hard to believe that Richard, a booking agent of twenty years standing would be surprised that an act he booked and advertised as Frankie Goes to Hollywood would be interpreted by the public to actually be Frankie Goes to Hollywood but here we are. But look how he took steps to counter the issue he created. In many ways he’s the hero.

Except according to Pollstar the name Frankie Goes To Hollywood without the ‘New’ prefix was still being used on his agency’s own website much to Lustig’s ‘surprise’.

“We’ve been changing it everywhere we can,”  Richard Lustig, Pollster, May 2000

(An advert for The New Frankie at ‘Shooters’, sharing a venue with the post-Natalie-Merchant 10,000 Maniacs.

Why use one of the fonts when you can use ALL OF THE FONTS)

Even with the New Frankie moniker, it didn’t stop newspapers from implying they were connected to the original band.

(The New Frankie : just a regrouped version of the old Frankie with a different singer as long as you didn’t know what anyone looked like)

Frankie Goes To Hollywood Featuring Davey Johnson was another title the band were billed as. On the surface this seems more honest but realistically, if a punter didn’t know the names of the band members to begin with, then this just sounds like it’s a group fronted by an original member.

(Featuring THE Davey Johnson)

Later, Fakey Goes To Hollywood found themselves on the “Club 80’s The Flashback Tour” with Flock of Seagulls. While the band’s management and bookers were falling over each other to tell everyone what a great show their Frankie mob put on, Flock of Seagulls front person Mike Score was less than complimentary;

“The new Frankie are laughable. They’re not even a passable cover band. They might as well call themselves Cleatus Goes To Alabama” Mike Score, Flock of Seagulls speaking to Spin magazine in 2000.

Score’s shit banter aside, this is a telling remark, especially when you consider both bands shared a booking agent. To pull off this kind of caper the band would need to be beyond reproach in their performance and the way they carried themselves. When a tenuously connected band gets rumbled, the stock answer is usually ‘But we put on a great show. Ask the audience if they didn’t enjoy it’ It’s a strawman argument against one of legitimacy but it does often work in the eyes of the punter.

I usually sit on the fence of these stories trying not to take sides. In a world where we’ve allowed the industry part of the Music Industry to dominate, I’m not sure how there can be any real response other than ‘oh, you’re doing that kind of shit thing as well? Typical.’ Also there’s the argument that these bands do provide musicians with solid, if unspectacular work.

This story is different, I’m not really a Frankie fan but it does kind of boil my piss. The proper Frankie were queer icons of 1980s pop, at a time of heightened rank homophobia and repression (like that’s changed, I know)… while the Faux Frankie’s manager, Chuck was almost in a hurry to point out the band were “all straight guys; they’re not gay,”  A bunch of straight hicks from Alabama going out as Frankie seems as appropriate as a bunch of Surrey trustafarians going out as Public Enemy.  Although I should make it clear that Chuck Harris didn’t clarify if they were straight in the traditional sense of the word or because they only fucked female cattle.

Seeing them on a Pride line up just makes me wonder if they had a commitment to their heritage or a commitment to paying bookings.

(Pride Fest listings in St Louis, Missouri)

Interestingly the Pride show also lists Chic on Sunday at 11.45am. It’s quite possible that this Chic are a fake version of the 70s Disco greats. The official band were back together at that time but it’s unlikely they’re playing a regional pride festival before midday. Still on paper; Frankie, Chic and Jimmy Somerville (assuming it actually was him!). That’s some line up.

A quick search of the Fake Frankie’s name throws up about 60 shows between the arse end of 1999 and early 2000s including a New Years Eve 1999 event in Singapore. They played such esteemed venues as The Fat City Deli in Charlotte, North Carolina and Dewey’s Deck Bar in Minnesota. The last show logged with Setlist.com was in October 2003 in St Petersburg, Florida.

Unlike other fake bands, the whole Frankie affair took place in the tail end of the 1990s. which was probably the last time a stunt like this could be pulled before the internet gave the fans a proper voice.

It seems the money involved wasn’t enough for a proper court case. Holly Johnson and his lawyer attempted to put a stop to it but phoning bookers and promoters to let them know what exactly they were getting.

When Johnson made it known that they were not authorised, Chuck Harris then claimed to have severed all ties with them but considering they were still taking bookings three years later that seems unlikely.

By 2003 the New Frankie had expose stories printed about them in Spin Magazine, Polster, Q magazine and finally the regional press were taking note. That’s when the game is up for this sort of thing in the US. There are whole cities of people who only read state press and when they were finally pointing out the fraud then the local venues lost interest.

Usually telling these stories, I enjoy the audacity of the venture, because often there is normally another side that, if not entirely defendable then understandable. But the Frankie story is grim and just seems like a blatant theft

(Regional Newspapers wising up to Frankie… Davey is now ‘no relation)

The final word should go to Holly Johnson who managed to destroy the whole caper in a wonderfully cutting manner,

“I’m very sorry that people who are getting duped. But God, what Frankie fan who knew anything about the group could possibly ever believe in a million years that we would play steak houses and county fairs?….It’s so small fry and unstylish” Holly Johnson, Spin Magazine September 2000.

The Frankie song I’ve chosen is the 12″ remix of Two Tribes. It’s the real deal. The video had Reagan fighting Konstantin Chernenko (he was head of the USSR for about six minutes in 1984. Seriously the 12” mix lasts longer than his leadership term) It’s the record all the cool kids talked about at school.

mp3: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes (12″ mix)

 

STEVE McLEAN

“No band has dominated a 12-month period like Frankie ruled 1984, with three singles all at No 1. Yet today they rarely get cited by other musicians.”

That was the opening gambit to a piece on Frankie Goes To Hollywood that appeared in The Guardian almost exactly six years ago. It was followed with these words:-

It is August 1984 and Frankie Goes To Hollywood are in their pomp. They have just spent their ninth week at No 1 with Two Tribes, that ultimate cold war-era document with the annihilating bassline that sounds, in the words of Capital Radio DJ Roger Scott, “like the end of the world”. To celebrate their final performance of it on Top of the Pops they are wearing matching white wedding jackets with black trousers and bow ties. After all the controversy surrounding Frankie – their previous No 1, Relax, was banned for its “obscene” content, and the video for Two Tribes was banned for being indecent – even this choice of outfit seems like a provocative gesture.

To further playfully mark the occasion, drummer Peter “Ped” Gill and bassist Mark O’Toole have swapped instruments, while singer Holly Johnson, to the bemusement of the BBC cameramen, prefaces his performance – with a mixture of relish and disgust – by tearing up a copy of the Sun, the newspaper that has been doorstepping his parents in Liverpool for quotes about their gay son.

Meanwhile, Relax has just climbed back up the charts to No 2, making this the first time anyone has occupied the top two slots since Hello Goodbye and the Magical Mystery Tour EP in January 1968. It’s official: Frankie are the most scandalous affront to decency since the Sex Pistols and the biggest band, Liverpudlian or otherwise, since the Beatles. “It was more than we imagined it could be,” marvels Paul Rutherford, Frankie’s co-frontman and dancing clone, of their 1984 heyday. “We just couldn’t see it coming at all. But God, we rode it. There’s been nothing like it since.”

FGTH burned very brightly and intensely for a short period. A third number one, at Christmas 1984, would be followed by the multi-million selling debut album, Welcome To The Pleasuredome. Very little was heard of them, musically, in 1985 and much of 1986 until new single Rage Hard was released. It marked a new sound, one that leaned more towards a rock sound than pop/electronica, and the critics panned it and the subsequent album, Liverpool. The band split within six months.

One of the reasons that FGTH don’t get quoted much is that the debut album and hit singles are really seen as the work of uber-producer Trevor Horn rather than the musicians, while there is also a great deal of cynicism around the way that Paul Morley, a journalist and writer who was as much reviled as he was admired, had proven to been part of the band’s rise to fame with the way he had hyped things up and devised a range of shock tactics, including the radio and video bans. Horn had nothing to do with the second album and Morley had eased himself away from everyday activities at ZTT Records. Indeed, nobody was denying that the FGTH musicians hadn’t played much on the debut but were rectifying matters on the follow-up, enabling everyone to draw a clear line in the sand if they so wanted.

It may have largely been hype, but there surely can’t be any arguement that the two initial #1 singles were trailblazing in so many ways and still have the capacity to sound great when blasted loudly through a decent set of speakers.

mp3: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax (Sex Mix)
mp3: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes (annihilation)

Both taken from the 12″ singles. The former is 7:25 in length and the latter extends to more than nine minutes, complete with dialogue that mimicked the advice given in the UK government’s propaganda film about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack (as well as comedian Chris Barrie doing a tremendous impression of President Ronald Reagan).  As such it requires an interested listener to make some considerable time to take it all in. But trust me, it’ll be worth it.

JC