1984 Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Two Tribes

After 'Relax' had laid waste to allcomers in the charts a few months previous there was tremendous anticipation as to what Frankie would do next - a viable concern or a one hit wonder? The jury was out. But not for long. Because for anyone keen to write them off as a one trick pony, 'Two Tribes' must have come as a swift kick in the nuts.

After 'doing' sex in 'Relax', FGTH now turned their attention to a war, though there was little original in that by itself. With Reagan and Chernenko presiding over world peace as if it were a game of chess, the eighties saw a number of artists turning cold war tension and the fear of nuclear attack into song. Nena had been there, done that (albeit obliquely) just a few weeks previous, and other bands (such as Young Marble Giants - 'Final Day' and the Television Personalities - 'A Sense Of Belonging') had already captured the feeling of morbid dread that prevailed.

With 'Two Tribes' though, FGTH abandoned the quiet anger proto indie template of the above in favour of a brash, in your face all out attack that recalled nothing less than Edwin Starr's 'War', with the iconic phrase 'War, what it is it good for?' replaced by the equally shoutable 'When two tribes go to war, A point is all you can score'.

Whereas 'Relax' thumped along with the subtlety of a metronomic sledgehammer, 'Two Tribes' opens with a creeping Eastern Bloc anthem of doom before grabbing your hand and pulling you headlong into an adrenalin rush of a fluid guitar riff that careers along at breakneck speed to the end, broken only by intermittently pounding drum fills. Like 'Relax' before it, Trevor Horn's watertight production is the true star here. From the off, 'Two Tribes' presents an almost solid body of sound that lets in no air, barely pauses for breath and yet is as flexible and rhythmical as the finest dance music.

Though it does not address East/West tensions directly, a memorable video of Regan and Chernenko look-alikes slugging it out toe to toe in a gravel pit left no doubt at the time as to what it was all about. And cleverly, like Starr's track before it, by avoiding directly mentioning any references to names and places, the song comes with no date stamp that links it to the Cold War (or Vietnam in Starr's case), making it is as applicable now as it was then.

'Two Tribes' came in a variety of original mixes, all of which are worth hearing (especially the 12" 'Annihilation' mix that samples Patrick Allen's post nuclear war public information film dialogue to memorably chilling effect) but the original single version is all you need. The seven inches of vinyl crams a hell of a lot into such a small space, a barnstorming three minute warning of a song that eschewed any fretful hand wringing to proclaim 'We're all going to die. Fuck it, let's dance'. And in 1984, everybody did.

1984 Wham!: Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

If there's one thing George Michael can never be accused of, it's being original. Having already pastiched rap ('Wham Rap') and Kid Creole's Latin big band swing ('Club Tropicana'), in 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' he presented a sound based on the heavy beat/fast tempo rhythm beloved of the Northern Soul scene. In fact, by opening with a clipped bassline before shifting gear into a keyboard led groove with rolling drum fills, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for The Jam's 'A Town Called Malice' from 1982, albeit a version put through a boil wash and spin-dry cycle to wash out all the grime.

And it's ironic that, after releasing four singles of social commentary dressed up in the finest pop clothes, 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go''s grittier template has absolutely nothing to say for itself beyond 'get up and dance'. Because from the opening chants of 'Jitterbug', 'Wake Me Up' is designed solely to put a smile on your face, which it does with some whipsmart lyrics:

"You take the grey skies out of my way
You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day
Turned a bright spark into a flame
My beats per minute never been the same"

and a bright, swinging chorus of sunshine that only a moron couldn't love. Yes it's vacuous, and no it's not deep, but you could say the same about so many classic pop songs from 'Baby Love' to 'Hit Me One More Time', all of which share the criteria of being constructed with care from parts built to last.

In truth, you wouldn't have needed Ms Ross or Ms Spears to make those songs into hits, both are memorable with a hardwired lifespan that will forever take them outside the era they were released. And although the sight of a young George Michael in his baggy 'Choose Life' T shirt in the video is undoubtedly an iconic eighties image, in truth, 'Wake Me Up' would have been a hit regardless of who was at the helm.

1984 Duran Duran: The Reflex

In two short years, Duran Duran had become what it took the Rolling Stones some fifteen years to achieve - that is, to become a bloated, self aware and self indulgent excess of gaudy pretension. Perhaps after seeing 'Is There Something I Should Know' get to number one, Duran Duran genuinely believed they could get away with any venture into musical areas and concepts that previously they might have thought twice about, safe in the knowledge that any cracks could be polyfillered with a new hairdo and a fancy video.

And in 1984, maybe they could. For in truth, 'The Reflex' shares a lot with that previous number one - to whit, a song with a dual verse structure that peters away until the chorus kicks in. But if 'Is There Something' was a shambles, 'The Reflex' revisits the format and actually corrects a lot of the mistakes by delivering a song with a far more precise structure that's confident it knows where it's going.

The pieces actually dovetail this time; the song flows from A to B without any jarring splinters and there is a genuine sense of anticipation in those few seconds of looped, disjointed beats before the change of key to the chorus elevates the song. A more muscled re-run of 'Rio' it might be, but it's far preferable to the weak anticlimax in the 'Is There Something'? effort.

Not that Duran Duran should take all the plaudits for the improvement mind; whilst the album version of the track was fair enough by itself, the shortened single version benefited hugely from an extensive Nile Rogers remix. In fact, Rogers seems to do the impossible here by making Duran Duran sound like Chic. Strip away the eighties gimmicks of the staccato stutter vocal effects and Nick Rhode's now tired Jupiter 8 sound and the heart of 'The Reflex' beats with a slick and polished funk groove where Andy Taylor's choppy, abrasive guitar lines bounce off John Taylor's walking bassline like sparks off a hammered anvil. Add to this a restrained yet prominent gospel-like backing whoops and sha la la's on the chorus and you have one of Duran Duran's most exciting and human sounding recordings to date.

Of course, despite the guiding hand of Rodgers, the band try their best to sabotage all the good work with Le Bon providing one of his flattest, tuneless, goose on the loose vocals, honking a set of half baked lyrics that aspire to the enigmatic and mysterious but instead come across as the work of a miserable and 'misunderstood' sixth form poet bored with rhyming 'rain' with 'pain':

"The reflex is an only child he's waiting in the park
The reflex is in charge of finding treasure in the dark
And watching over lucky clover isn't that bizarre?
Every little thing the reflex does leaves you answered with a question mark"

But this was typical of those crazy New Romantics - frilly shirts, big hair and too much make up needed a corresponding soundtrack, and so a colourful dog's dinner image needed colourful dog's dinner lyrics to match. And on that score, Duran Duran rarely let them down.

1984 Lionel Richie: Hello

Prior to 'Hello', Lionel Richie was best known as songwriter and vocalist with The Commodores who had UK hits with ballads like 'Three Times A Lady', 'Still' and 'Sail On' in the seventies. 'Hello' was his first and last UK number one to date.

'Hello' is probably best remembered for a sickly and overly long promotional video that were so popular in the eighties and cast Richie as a college lecturer behaving in a highly inappropriate way toward a blind female student by stalking her in school and making silent phone calls while she was in bed. I'm sure his intentions were nothing but honourable, but viewing it with modern eyes it's more than a bit creepy; if he tried anything like that these days then at best he would surely have been in receipt of an ASBO. At worst he'd be signing the register, though watching it again, I'm not sure if his attempts at acting aren't the biggest crime on display.

And it's a shame, because while some videos that are inextricably linked to the songs they promoted (think A-ha's 'Take On Me' or Michael Jackson's 'Thriller') in a way that compliments and creates a whole package, the nonsense dreamed up for 'Hello' only serves to detract from what is after all quite an emotive ballad that has nothing much to do with an orange clay head (watch the video if you don't know what I'm on about). The end result is that it's now hard to hear Richie singing 'Hello, is it me you're looking for?' without visualising his over the top, bug eyed mugging in the video.

And, once again, it's a shame because 'Hello' is a charming and perceptive song about loving from afar and wanting to talk to the person of your dreams but forgetting how to speak. Because this person could be anywhere - the person who catches your train every morning, the person you live across the way from, the person who crosses your path but never enters your world - just someone you would love to get to know better but secretly know that inertia or shyness simply won't let it happen. We've all been there, and Richie captures the emotion with economy and perceptiveness:

"Because I wonder where you are,
And I wonder what you do
Are you somewhere feeling lonely,
Or is someone loving you?
Tell me how to win your heart
For I haven't got a clue"

And yet what spoils the song is a case of too much 'too'. For a tender paean to unrequited love it's too over egged; the production is too fussy and too dramatic with too many plodding minor chords, too many guitar solos, too much echo in the vocal and too many heavy handed drum interludes etc.

I could go on, but in short it comes across like Nick Drake as produced by Jim Steinman and it's a partnership that should have been annulled before it ever got going. There is probably a cracking demo of 'Hello' somewhere in Richie's vaults that would wipe the floor with the overpolished final version which is essentially a thin person struggling to get out of a fat body.

Not that there's anything wrong with fat bodies per se you understand, and even in this form I wouldn't regard 'Hello' as obese, but had Richie told his producer (James Anthony Carmichael) to 'do it like you did 'Three Times A Lady', then 'Hello' could have rightfully taken it's place on the podium with the best of Motown. As it stands, it's by no means a disaster, but it's just about par when it could so easily have been a hole in one.

1984 Nena: 99 Red Balloons

And still the Germans keep on coming, the fourth Deutsch number one in a matter of months had already been in a number one in its native country and much of the rest of Europe (as "99 Luftballons") the year before, a version that also hit number two in America. Rather like 'Blondie' before them, Nena was the name of the band as a whole rather than the poutingly photogenic lead singer (who name was actually Gabriele Kerner).

There was no mention of 'Red' balloons in the original German version (a 'Luftballon' is apparently any toy balloon) and it was only added in the English translation to make the verse scan properly. It could just as well have been Blue or Green, but you get the picture. Both versions though have a similar theme - that is, a stray crop of 99 Balloons crossing over an unidentified European border and sparking a major nuclear incident (this was the eighties after all). And if the words are different between the versions, the music is the same - that is, synthesiser led soft rock with most of the rock removed.

It's strange that such a weighty subject matter should be accompanied by the limpest of backings. Rather than tub thumping drums and crashing power chords, '99 Red Balloons' flies on the back of cheesy synthesiser riffs with added slap bass fills that don't gel all that much until the song proper actually gets going, and then the guitar riffs and drum rolls are buried so inoffensively low in the mix that they are barely there.

Kerner's tongue lolls around the lyrics in a slightly muddled way as if she has a mouthful of bratwurst; it is literally only today that I've found out that the lyric is actually 'Back at base, bugs in the software' and not 'sparks in the software', and that it's 'opens up one eager eye' and not 'eagle eye' as I've always thought. So you live and learn. True, though her accented sing/speak delivery adds a touch of the exotic to the song, it does little to convey the urgency of the situation - this is cold war paranoia and nuclear war she is singing about here after all.

I should lay my cards on the table at this point and say I had the most stupendous crush on Ms Kerner in 1984 and listened to '99 Red Balloons' on my Walkman until the tape wore out. And I loved it. Twenty five years on, I can't let my nostalgic heart rule my rational head and I have to admit that the song has not aged well. Though it knocked FGTH off the number one spot, in comparison it can be said that 'Relax' in 1984 was the sound of the present and the future rolled into one stay fresh package.

But by trying to be achingly modern, '99 Red Balloons' pulled virtually every eighties cliché out of its hat, meaning that in Feb 1984 it sounded as contemporary and cool as a phone in the car or Matthew Broderick hacking into the Pentagon in 'War Games' by physically dialling on a telephone and plugging the handset into a computer socket. And how modern do these things seem now? Exactly.

1984 Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Relax

By 1984, with punk and it's following new wave movement a distant memory, the UK charts had become a safe and conservative landscape. It would probably have been pushing it by expecting to see Whitehouse or SPK on Top Of The Pops, but the endless procession of AOR ballads and identikit fops in make up seemed a far cry from the prophecies of Orwell's year of doom and the charts were in dire need of someone to shake things up by throwing a spanner of danger into the corporate machine.

Opening with an ominous bass drum thump of intent that hits like a repeated punch to the chest, 'Relax' explodes into an unstoppable chorus that breaks the butterflies in its path as surely and completely as a millstone grinds corn. And 'Relax' genuinely is virtually all chorus, a refrain repeated throughout that should wear before the song ends, but it's next to impossible not to get caught up in Trevor Horn's all encompassing violent carpet bomb of sound that sweeps all before it like the waters that cleansed the Aegean stables, making the title somewhat ironic.

What delivers the track from total bombast of music by production is the puck-like figure of Holly Johnson and his gleeful vocal. The highly suggestive packaging and S&M themed video weren't needed to court controversy - though no longer as sleazy as it once appeared, 'Relax' is still far removed from the good time camp of the Village People and the openly gay Johnson delivers the suggestive lyrics with the smirking cockiness of the troublemaking kid at the back of the school bus flicking Vs at the cars behind.

"Relax don't do it when you want to go to it
Relax don't do it when you want to come"

So in hindsight, does this contain the 'overtly sexual' inferences that upset Mike Read enough to refuse to play it? Probably. But it doesn't matter, because even if the writers in their naivety meant 'come' as in arriving from somewhere, Johnson's enunciation bends it to the meaning he wants in a way not seen in the charts since Johnny Rotten made it only too obvious that his 'vacant' didn't refer to an empty space.

By the time this left the charts in 1984, FGTH were everywhere. 'Relax' pounded out of every pub jukebox, every nightclub and every clothes shop on the High Street, while every other T shirt worn seemed to proclaim what Frankie were saying; FGTH and 'Relax' were to the eighties what a turkey is to Christmas. It wasn't pretty, but it was, and remains, big and clever and its primal energy and euphoria remain undimmed over two decades on.

1984 Paul McCartney: Pipes Of Peace

In 1984, McCartney was still managing to ride the goodwill carried over from his Beatles years. His solo/Wings career, although patchy, did throw up the odd classic and expectation was still high with every release that he'd finally got his groove back. Unfortunately, 'Pipes Of Peace' falls well short of any 'classic' status and summed up in just under four minutes everything that was wrong with Paul McCartney in the eighties.

For a start, it tries to be too clever for it's own good. With an overly busy tune, a shifting key and a vocal section that is a definite nod to The Beatles' 'Carry That Weight', 'Pipes Of Peace' sounds like an offcut from side two of Abbey Road, a demo of some tunes tried and discarded or else subsequently polished into something quite different. Veteran producer George Martin tries his best with trademark flourishes and military march motifs, but no amount of studio trickery can disguise the fact that the foundations here are shaky from the off.

The three main musical 'parts' sound limp and unfinished by themselves, like three individual pieces of work in progress that are following their own separate paths which would not ordinarily cross. Bringing them together and mounting them as a triptych does not produce an outcome greater than the sum of it's parts; it's as if McCartney is so assured of his own genius that he believes he can throw any old tune together and his natural magic will make it gel. But it doesn't - it sounds forced, laboured and a bit of a mess; in short, a far cry from the clean, direct lines of the best of his previous work.

Secondly, after solving the question of racism with 'Ebony And Ivory', McCartney again goes hunting for bear and tries to sort out another biggie: world peace:

"What do you say?
Will the human race be run in a day?
Or will someone save this planet we're playing on?
Is it the only one?
Help them to see
That the people here are like you and me
Let us show them how to play the pipes of peace"

Had this been the work of a precocious twelve year old high school student entering a poetry competition, then such wide eyed innocent optimism might be passable. But in coming from one of the major songwriters of the twentieth century, it's a shock akin to finding out that 'Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth' was actually the work of Sylvia Plath and not Pam Ayres who it had been erroneously credited to. A video re-creating the World War One Christmas Day football match (with McCartney playing both the British AND German officer) was a touch heavy handed too, a literal interpretation of the mawkish lyrics that even Pan's People would have though a bit too obvious and unimaginative.

The fact that it was still more or less Christmastime no doubt helped this 'message of hope', complete with a children's choir, to the top of the charts on a wave of gooey eyed sentiment. But this was to be an Indian Summer for McCartney and marked the last time he would appear there in his own right. The goodwill had to run out sometime.